


Iteration

by Akshi



Category: Berserk
Genre: Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:44:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akshi/pseuds/Akshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Berserk AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_In this world man’s destiny is controlled by some transcendental entity or law…like there exists a hand of God. At least man knows that he has no control over his own destiny._

When the body crumbles to dust where does the soul go? The answer is different for each corpse. Some fall with the body and do not rise again. They sleep undisturbed for aeons. Some are not reconciled. They have seen too much, done too much, and are tied to others in a slow dance that takes many lifetimes to spin to a halt.  
Many lifetimes, or never, as they endure an unending sequence with permutations in each cycle, changes that are never drastic enough to stop the music and free the dancers.  
The Hand can be merciful – most do not realise that they are playing out the same story again and again. Some are not so lucky – they may bleed, but they continue to spin as they recall their past existences. A trade is required: one willing life to partner each of the damned and spin them out of the eternal dance. It is not easy. It is not expected to be.  
*

 **Chapter One**  
 _Hitosu, Hitoyo no koi naraba_  
(One, it's a love in one generation)  
\- Yoma Counting Song

Gatts swims through blue glass that ripples and parts smoothly to let him pass. Under the water he can see his brown arms describing languid arabesques in front of him, dappled with shifting patterns of sunlight. Below him, shoals of flickering fish dart in and out of the coral reefs, growing smaller as he swims towards the surface. Above him – he rolls over to float on his back and peers through slit eyes – the afternoon sun glows in his peripheral vision and gulls lazily swoop and dive through the air. Waves of air caress his wet body as he drifts on the water. Soon it will be time to return home and help with the evening chores at the forge, but – not yet!  
Drifting in the dreamy state between sleep and awareness, Gatts closes his eyes. He can almost imagine that his body has vanished and it is his mind, weightless, that is floating on endless blue, shading into indigo at the edge of the horizon, and then into red, the red of the sun through his eyelids. His heartbeat sounds again and again in his ears, beginning to pound through his body, and is suddenly external to him, as if he is enclosed within a cavernous womb.  
Without warning he is inside the Dream. Sharp light flickers at the edge of his vision, as his eyes drown in red and images of blood flash in front of him. His body spasms convulsively, rejecting this intrusion of his vision into his waking hours, and he retches and flings his arms out in denial.  
Memories rise up to combine with the visions: beatings that left him quivering in a corner of the shack, humiliations to cow him, always lit by the unsteady light of the blacksmith’s furnace. Images of his foster father with his hand raised; the mocking faces of village children above him as he sprawls in the dust; whispers and taunts forming a constant refrain in his mind: _dead woman’s child, outcast, unclean!_  
He spirals slowly towards the bottom of the ocean in a shroud of bubbles. Dimly, he realises he should be doing something to save himself, trying to control his limbs and failing. He forces his eyes open to find a white face floating in front of him, streamers of pure white undulating gently around the perfect oval. It is so beautiful that he knows immediately what it is: a medusa, that most lovely and dangerous of all the secret creatures. He smiles gently at his personal death and falls forward into blackness.  
*

Gatts wakes with his throat and lungs burning and sits up to cough and spit out the residual seawater, dislodging the hands braced on his chest to pump the water out. His monster is hovering over him, kneeling with white hair spilling over its shoulders. ‘Are you alright?’ the apparition asks and he realises with a jolt of disappointment that it is only a boy; albeit of a type he has never seen before. The dreamlike quality of the afternoon vanishes and the disappointment coagulates into his habitual resentment.  
He pushes himself up, startling the boy, and walks away as quickly as his aching limbs will allow him to. Ignoring the exclamation he hears behind him, he breaks into a run, knowing that it is already too late for him to avoid punishment. Running anyway, his lungs protesting, he crosses the outskirts of the village, past families sitting outside their homes, repairing their nets and gossiping in the cool of the evening.  
A foot reaches out to trip him and he falls forward, scraping his palms on sandy ground. He remains still until two pairs of feet move into range, and then sweeps his foot around in a wide arc, tripping both boys and springing to his feet. The fight begins in earnest, welcomed by his widening snarl and his fists.  
Repeated beatings from his foster father have not taught him to accept this humiliation from the other village boys. A part of his mind admits that if they did not provoke him, he might still find reason to fight; deep down he enjoys this – his fists bruising their bodies, splitting their lips and making them all bleed. He kicks viciously at a boy lying on the ground, hearing the sound of his foot connecting with satisfaction.  
He is too involved in meeting blow with blow to notice boys falling out of the fight one by one. When the fighting slows and the red haze clears from his vision, he spins to see the white-haired boy standing behind him, guarding his back. The village boys are all flat on the ground or moving away.  
‘I didn’t need your help,’ he says.  
A white brow arches as the boy turns to face him, one hand braced on his hip. ‘You got it anyway,’ the boy says. ‘Isn’t it customary to thank people on these occasions?’  
But he is not thankful at all, already conscious of eyes and more eyes from the shade of thatched huts linking him to this freak. ‘Fuck off,’ he says.  
‘No-o, I don’t think so. What’s your name?’ The boy’s mouth forms a tiny smile, which only makes him angrier, sparking the aggression remaining from the fight. He hits out, catching the boy by surprise. The boy licks his swollen lip and moves smoothly out of the way of his next swing. They spar for a while and he sees that the boy is still smiling: he’s enjoying this. It catches him off guard and the boy neatly trips him, and then sits on his back. One arm is pushed high above his back. ‘Enough for you?’ the boy asks solicitously.  
‘Fuck you,’ and his arm is pushed higher, screaming with pain.  
‘Enough?’  
He repeats his earlier reply, pain having shrunk his world down to those two words and the determination not to give in.  
The boy sighs. ‘Have it your own way.’ Abruptly, his shoulder is dislocated and he faints for the second time that day.  
*

This time he wakes on a soldier’s pallet in a tent lit by flickering lamps. So the boy must be with the company currently camped outside the village, although he doesn’t look like a soldier. His left arm is bound up; someone has tended to it and the pain is present but bearable. He looks around the tent, noting a rather ostentatious bed in one corner and other expensive furnishings. The tent flap opens to let in the white-haired boy, who gives him a flask of water. He drinks deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he finishes.  
‘Let’s start again. Who are you?’  
He stares at him, not knowing what to make of this peculiar creature. Somehow, his earlier anger has leached away, leaving only a weary sort of bemusement. The boy’s eyes are clear and very intent. There is no mockery in them that he can see, no contempt or disgust underlain with fear, and it is this that makes him answer.

‘Gatts.’  
‘I am Griffith.’  
‘You fight well,’ Gatts tells him.  
‘I know,’ he replies, but so calmly that his arrogance seems only natural. ‘So do you.’ Gatts looks him over, realising that he is a few years younger than Griffith, even though they are of much the same height. But then, he has always been too big – unnaturally big – for his age.  
Someone enters the tent, breaking the silence with a loud ‘How do you feel, my boy?’ Gatts looks around to see a large florid man with a noble’s crest on a chain around his neck advancing to stand behind Griffith. ‘Fine, my lord,’ he replies, scrambling to his feet. Gatts watches the man’s hand settle on Griffith’s shoulder.  
‘My lad doesn’t normally get into scrapes, but I’m glad someone was there to help him,’ the noble says, stroking the side of Griffith’s face with one hand. Griffith’s eyes are veiled now, half-lidded, before he looks down and nuzzles against the man’s hand. Something like shock goes through Gatts.  
‘You’ll be on your way now, I suppose?’ the man continues, his hand moving down Griffith’s back. ‘Here’s a little something for helping Griffith.’  
A coin spins through the air towards him and Gatts catches it reflexively, thanking him and hoping his disgust doesn’t show.  
‘I’ll show him the way out of camp, my lord,’ Griffith says, moving away from the man’s roving hand and ducking out of the tent behind Gatts. Gatts tries not to look at him as they stand outside the tent, disappointment once again sour in his mouth. The moon lights the scene faintly; dim man-shapes move in the darkness, polishing weapons and carrying water.  
‘Meet me on the beach tomorrow at sunrise,’ comes a low voice. Gatts whips around to face Griffith, who looks at him with hard eyes and no hint of embarrassment in his manner. He raises his voice to give Gatts directions out of the camp, then turns and goes back into the tent. The tent flap remains slightly open and through it Gatts can see Griffith being pulled towards the man, pliant and unresisting, as his mouth is claimed in a greedy kiss.  
*

As he makes his way back to the village, dismay seeps through him at the thought of how long he has been gone from home. Hesitating, his feet pause as the path divides into two. If he goes back now, he will be beaten too badly to go anywhere for the next day or so. But why should he go to meet Griffith when the boy has turned out to be exactly what he looks like: a pampered bum boy, a camp follower who trades his ass for money? Notwithstanding the insults his mind is heaping on the boy, his feet pull him inexorably towards the beach. Padding through soft sands lit by moonlight, he finds the spot where he had lain earlier, and settles into the white sand for the night.  
He opens his eyes as the sun begins to rise, long rays sparkling on the sand around him. His arm aches dully, but he knows it will heal soon. His unnaturally quick healing is something else that infuriates his foster father. The sound of waves lapping at the shore is interrupted by splashes behind him and he turns to see the boy throwing pebbles into the water. Griffith is dressed only in a pair of worn breeches. A misshapen red stone hangs on a leather thong around his neck. He turns towards Gatts, looking at him sombrely.  
‘I want to raise a mercenary band. There’s good money to be made working for the King’s court in Garima.’  
He doesn’t know how he should react to this extraordinary statement. This pretty boy leading a mercenary army? And where would he get the money for it? Unless that was why he was whoring himself out…  
‘Gennon will give me my war chest if I please him,’ Griffith says, anticipating his thoughts. He stares at Gatts directly, his face blank and consciously devoid of shame. Gatts understands that this is another statement in itself.  
The blue eyes are still looking at him, gauging his reaction and evaluating it. There is, Gatts realises, a tinge of calculation in everything this boy says or does. The pure profile turns sideways, suddenly distant, one hand fingering the pendant around his neck as he speaks.  
‘There are only the rulers and the ruled in every country. And, till now, there has been no vision or strength of mind that differentiates one from the other. That will change with me, Gatts,’ he sweeps his arm out in a wide arc. ‘I know that this is all mine to take.’  
‘Will you join me?’ Griffith asks, looking at him.  
Gatts has to laugh. ‘Are you mad? I am not even old enough to leave home without being brought back and beaten.’  
‘What are you, fourteen? I’ll come back for you in a year.’  
He takes a mean pleasure in saying ‘I’m twelve,’ and seeing the surprise in Griffith’s face, but the expression fades fast.  
‘No matter. I’ll come back in three years, then.’  
‘What the hell do you want with me? I can’t even use a weapon yet!’ Gatts says. He is obscurely angry with this boy for trying to involve him in his foolish dreams. Look at them now: two stupid boys, each as wretched as the other!  
‘I knew when I saw you…’ – and for a moment Griffith hesitates, the constant calculation in his eyes replaced momentarily by confusion – ‘when I saw you fight those boys that you would be a strong fighter.’  
It is not what he was going to say. There is a long silence, broken by the sounds of gulls wheeling and diving over the ocean.  
Looking at the stranger, Gatts acknowledges, wordlessly, what Griffith does not want to say out loud. That they have been linked since the first moment they looked into each other’s faces underwater. That he does not know much about Griffith, and what he does know should not dispose him to believe anything he says, but that he believes him nonetheless. That he does not know anything of friendship or loyalty but is somehow ready to join his life to Griffith’s anyway.  
‘I want you,’ Griffith says. ‘Will you join me when I come back?’  
‘Yes,’ Gatts says. ‘Yes, I will.’


	2. Chapter 2

_Futatsu, Futari de jigoku e to_  
(Two, the two of us go to hell)

Gatts is crouching down inside a clump of bushes, shivering with the force of his fear. It is only an hour past the time he met Griffith on the beach, but the meeting is the furthest thing from his mind right now. Even the events of the past hour have blurred into a series of sensory impressions: pain from the expected beating; the red glow of the forge fire in the early morning; the cold fear running through his body when he realised his foster father really meant to brand him. One terrified push, a scream, and a terrible sizzling smell of burnt flesh. He had not even stopped to look back, terrified that he would see a hand reaching from the fire to drag him in as well, or hold him fast until the village elders came to pronounce judgement on him.  
He knows that he has very little time. There is no question of going back to apologize, telling them that it was an accident. No one in the village will care enough to believe him, least of all his foster family. They have never had any love for him. Any number of calamities had been attributed to his unlucky presence even before he had learned to walk.  
Briefly, he thinks of Griffith. Could he help? But no, it is too risky, and he has spent too much of his life trusting only in himself to break the habit now. He has to get out. With the certain instinct of self-preservation, he begins to run again, toward the main road leading away from the village. Knowing the villagers, they will search in the military camp first, as the place he is mostly likely to run to. That, and the tending of his foster father’s burns will buy him time.  
Soon, he is standing hidden in the shadow of a tree beside the road. Despite the early hour, there are wagons and riders moving briskly down the road toward Perille, the large neighbouring town, and beyond into the Southern provinces. He steps out and calls to a passing wagon carrying cabbages. The driver, a rotund man with a placid expression, stops to listen to his story about visiting his brother in Perille, and lets him climb up beside him. They drive on at a good pace, the driver flicking his horses with his whip from time to time. Gatts tells him more lies: that he is exhausted, having awoken very early that morning to walk to the main road from a far village, and could he possibly go to sleep among the cabbages in the bed of the wagon? Hardly waiting for assent, he clambers back and slides onto his front among the vegetables, where he will be invisible to anyone from the road.  
He spends some hideously uncomfortable hours pretending to sleep, in reality keeping both ears cocked for sounds of pursuit. By the time they reach Perille, his shoulders hurt with the tension in his body. Gatts yawns hugely and falsely when they reach the Restday market of the town, where the wagon driver stops to unload his vegetables. Thanking him profusely and assuring him that his brother is staying in an inn very close to the market, he climbs out of the wagon and walks into a nearby alley to gather his thoughts.  
Gatts knows that his foster father will not have the resources to mount an extensive search for him, nor the inclination, once the first heat of his anger dies. On the other hand, he can’t afford to take chances, so he has to get as far south as he can. It doesn’t take him much time to find the road leading out of the town and south of his home province of Siova. He is outwardly grateful and secretly amazed at the willingness of travellers to allow him to ride with them and share their provisions with him. The simple kindness he encounters only reinforces his belief that there is something deformed inside him, which, if these travellers only knew about it, would cause them to treat him as the villagers have treated him all his life.  
Weeks pass in this way, as Gatts moves haphazardly from town to village to town, edging slowly across the vast fertile delta that makes up the best part of three provinces, down into the hotter desert regions of the Southern provinces. He begins to stop for a few days here, a few days there, doing manual labour to earn food. It has been a good year for the farmer-folk who live in these parts, and he often gets a copper coin along with a hot meal for a day’s work. In reserve, at the bottom of his right boot, is the silver coin that Griffith’s master tossed him. Sometimes he thinks of the sea, missing the susurrations of the palm trees when he sleeps at night, but he is not surprised to find that he misses little else about the village. Sometimes he thinks of Griffith, of his promise to come back for him, with a pang that might be regret.  
Perhaps this is why, when he comes across a group of mercenaries training in the desert town of Urai, he stops to watch them drill. It is common for the larger towns in remote areas, where the King’s power is weak, to hire such groups to protect their harvest wealth. The men have stripped down to their breeches in the hot sun and their muscles gleam with sweat as they shout and attack each other with practice swords. The sparring rouses in him the hunger to fight that has been submerged under other considerations these past weeks. He watches with avid eyes, forgetting to eat, as the sun creeps across the sky.  
Eventually, in one corner of the square, he notices a thickset man standing behind a clerk sitting at a soldier’s collapsible table. They are both watching the men and there are pieces of vellum and a quill on the table. Gatts realises with a thrill that the group is probably recruiting new fighters. After all, the nearer autumn draws, the more the group will be in demand to guard and transport coffers stocked with gold from the harvest. He barely hesitates before walking over to the recruiter. ‘Sir, can I sign up?’ he asks and they both look at him.  
The standing man has a good-humoured cynical face that creases in a smile as he replies. ‘Aren’t you a little young for this?’ Both men laugh.  
Gatts can feel himself flushing, and asks again, only to get the same answer. ‘We don’t take children. Besides, your parents might object.’  
He tells them that he has no parents, that he fights well with his hands and learns fast.  
‘It’s not easy, boy, and it’s not glamorous. You’ll starve most seasons and freeze the rest.’  
He doesn’t care, he says, to all the men’s objections. He asks and keeps asking until the big man finally throws up his hands.  
‘Shut up! All right, we’ll take you on, but you’ll be getting no pay until you start fighting with us.’  
That’s fine, he tells them, where should he go?  
One week later, Gatts is leaving the town with the band. The big man, Madik Roose, is the captain of this band, the Lizards, and he has not exaggerated in his account of the hardships of mercenary life. For months, Gatts is run off his feet morning and night, fetching, carrying, polishing and, most of all, drilling with a sword. Shorter and younger than anyone else in the group, he is forced to use a sword that is almost as tall as he is. Each night he falls onto his thin pallet aching in every part of his body.  
As his twelfth year progresses, Gatts realises that he has not had a single Dream since leaving the village. Waking up from a cheerfully ordinary dream about swimming loaves of bread with fins, he almost cries with relief that he has not seen death or blood or pain in his sleep. Soon enough, however, he has the chance to see all three in his waking hours, when Roose decides that he is ready to go into battle with them.  
His test comes when the Lizards attack a castle under siege, hired by one southern lord to make war against another. Feuding nobles, Roose tells him seriously, as Gatts sits sharpening his captain’s sword the night before the battle, make for a very good source of income, especially in the leaner summer months.  
The battle is surprisingly easy for him, although he has his share of nausea and uncertainty beforehand. It is almost as though he is meant to be in the midst of this sweaty horde of men and horses, slashing and bashing away at other fighters. His feet flow naturally from stance to stance, his sword arm rises and falls with precision, and if the face of the first man that he kills appears in his dreams for a month after the battle, well, that is no one’s affair but his own. He kills six men and receives a bonus from the captain when the castle falls after two days of fighting.  
That night, he sits nursing a drink in the cellars of the castle, watching as older mercenaries break open casks of expensive wine and grope whores who have swarmed to entertain them from the nearby village. He is content to brood for a while, mourning the loss of his – innocence? He snorts. He has never had that. But he does feel as though he has lost…something. He knows that he is beyond redemption now; that the small fishing community he comes from would throw up their hands in horror at the killing he has done.  
No matter, he decides with a spark of anger. He is done with them and all of their petty hypocrisies. Where were they when his foster father was beating him into the ground on a regular basis? Well, and so he kills now – what of it? Be damned to them, those who had turned their faces away when he walked past them. If he could go back now, he would spit in their faces. With sudden decision, he lifts his mug in the air and drains it, toasting his new life.  
>

Three years pass in this manner. Gatts rises in his captain’s esteem, as his skill with the sword becomes common knowledge within the group. He acquires a horse and begins riding into battle directly behind Roose. He grows used to wielding an oversized sword and spends part of his pay on a bigger sword once his growth spurt stretches him taller and wider. He makes no close friends in the band apart from his mentor. He thinks hardly at all of his previous life, except on the day that he turns fifteen, when he remembers white sand and a gilded boy. Griffith will have come and gone by now, he tells himself. That is, if he really did manage to get his money from his fat noble, which is not likely.  
The Lizards roam from one province to another, depending on where there are good pickings, but mostly confine themselves to the region south of the river Durai, which bisects Midland. Madik, a weathered veteran, leads them capably and their numbers grow as the months of Gatts’ fifteenth year go by. That summer they are hired to swell the numbers of a town’s rebellion against a provincial lord, in protest at higher taxes on wheat. Unlike the town’s leadership, Gatts and his captain know that the rebellion will go absolutely nowhere: the provincial lord is supported by the King himself, and royal army regiments will no doubt arrive to reinforce the noble’s battalions, but that is no reason why the Lizards should not make some money off these gullible townsmen and slip away before the conflict is settled.  
Something goes badly wrong in the middle of the battle. Perhaps they have grown overconfident after years of well-executed plans. The planned retreat turns into a horrific scene of carnage, as an unexpected battalion of royal soldiers appears from the west to trap them in conjunction with the advancing troops in the east. A hail of arrows cuts down Lizard fighters, and Gatts’ captain dies instantly as an arrow pierces him through the eye. Weeping with rage and grief, Gatts finds himself fighting desperately to get out of the battlefield. Swinging his sword down in one last killing stroke, he rides past the enemy corpse, only to confront a man on a white horse at the edge of the field. He raises his sword once more, wearily prepared to hack his way through again, when a red pendant around the man’s neck catches his eye. Surely, it’s not – hesitating, he watches as the stranger removes his helmet and long white hair tumbles out.  
‘Hello, Gatts,’ says Griffith.  
>

The night of the defeat finds Gatts sitting in Griffith’s tent, a spartan enough affair with a single pallet, a soldier’s table and two collapsible chairs. The owner of the tent is occupying one chair, punctuating his words with the gestures of a hand holding a cup of wine, while Gatts sits in the other, with a cup of his own. The wine has been brought by Griffith’s second in command, a woman named Casca, who has made her instant dislike of Gatts very evident. Griffith seems to be more amused than annoyed by it. Having extracted Gatts’ story from him within the first hour of their reunion, Griffith is now holding forth on his own adventures since they last saw each other.  
‘I came back every year, you know, as I said I would. Gennon gave me a couple of soldiers to drill the year after you left, more as a joke than anything else, but I did a good enough job that he let me stay in charge and gave me a few more men to lead. I suppose it made a good conversation piece, the boy whore who led soldiers. He himself was most unfortunately,’ here his eyes sparkle maliciously, ‘afflicted by mysterious ailments several times that year, which only helped me prove myself.’  
Griffith pauses here to refill both their glasses. Gatts reflects muzzily that he has had much more to drink than he normally does. Inside his chest, the loss of his captain is a dull ache, but he has been distracted enough not to have had to really think about it so far.  
‘He eventually decided he was done with army life and went back to his home in the city. He took me with him, but was _sadly_ struck down by typhoid soon after. Thankfully, not before giving me my war chest! So, now I lead a hundred men, give or take a few. We are attached to the army, but not strictly part of it. I am waiting for the right moment for us to strike out on our own, as a fully-fledged band.’  
Griffith has become, if anything, even more unreal in appearance and assured in his manner than he was three years ago. He is almost inhumanly beautiful in the lamplight, even dressed in scuffed and worn soldier’s garb. An unusual commander, perhaps, but not one to take lightly. Gatts reflects that Griffith’s tactics, as demonstrated on the field that morning, had finished the Lizards off with almost insulting ease. He has yet to find out how Griffith had managed to find him in the thick of battle. ‘Magic,’ Griffith had replied when he asked him, fingering the ugly pendant around his neck.  
‘So, I’ll be returning to the capital in a few days, once we mop up the remnants of this little fracas. Will you come with me?’  
Gatts squints at the red wine in his cup. Again, it seems, he might be swept up in this strange boy’s trail. He hadn’t minded the first time, to be sure, and there is nothing left for him here.  
‘Yes,’ he says, for the second time in his life.


	3. Chapter 3

_Mittsu, Mina wo koroshitemo_  
(Three, even though we kill everybody)

They travel to the north in rapid stages, retracing part of Gatts’ flight from his village. Mercenary life has gone much of the way in preparing Gatts to adapt to the army. He accepts unfamiliar rules and regulations with equanimity, watching and waiting as the equations among Griffith’s unit become clear to him. Casca, Griffith’s surly second, is demanding but fair. If he could only understand why she dislikes him so, they would probably get on quite well. The other members of Griffith’s inner circle are Judeau, a thin watchful man, Pippin, a lumbering giant and Rickert, a boy even younger than Gatts. Oh, and Corkus, a chronic complainer and someone else who has taken an instant dislike to Gatts, which Gatts is only too happy to reciprocate.  
Riding in the Southern provinces during the summer is exhausting, the heat and the sand flies combining to make life miserable. Griffith’s men follow the real army battalions. They are used, Griffith explains, mostly for tasks requiring fewer men and greater finesse than the common run of army operations. Travel becomes easier once they reach the pleasant river delta areas of Siova, and again more difficult as they cross further north into the tropical region, approaching Garima, the King’s capital. The route they follow bypasses Gatts’ village, causing him both disappointment and relief.  
Nights spent sitting at the campfire allow Gatts to form cordial relations with Rickert, Pippin and Judeau. Griffith, too, spends his nights in the company of his men, when he is not reading some obscure text or the other. Three years in a mercenary group have given Gatts a fine sensitivity to the morale of a military unit, and he observes that the Hawks, as Griffith’s small company of men like to call themselves, are capable and contented. The Hawks have an almost blind faith in Griffith’s leadership, curious to note in some of the more grizzled and battered soldiers, whom he might have expected to be more than a little sceptical of such an atypical leader.   
Presently, golden fields of wheat turn into the green of rice paddies, sure sign of a land moving to the rhythm of the monsoons. Dirt roads turn into paved ones and inns and brothels begin appearing with monotonous regularity on the side of the road. The pace slackens with these signs of civilization, as soldiers starved for the delights of wine and women begin flocking to these institutions, much to the dismay of their commanders.   
In this way, they reach Garima exactly a month after the Lizards’ last battle. Gatts, noting the date, is conscious only of a brief pang of sorrow for Madik. He has already made his offering in his captain’s memory at a wayside shrine to Inari, a little-known goddess. Madik would have appreciated the gesture. Inari was his favourite deity; a little jade carving of the goddess had always hung around his neck when he was alive. Under the hard-bitten exterior, his captain had been a surprisingly religious man.  
Griffith wears a pendant, too, but it is not a religious symbol Gatts is familiar with. He remembers asking him about it one night, as they sat around the campfire. Griffith had slipped it off to hold in his hands, smiling thoughtfully. He didn’t know exactly why he wore it, he said, didn’t even remember exactly how he had gotten it. But it always seemed to help him think more clearly. Once it had even saved his life, deflecting an arrow aimed at him in the middle of a battle.   
He had tossed it to Gatts, who bent to examine it willingly enough. The firelight had played some trick on his eyes because, when he looked down, the lumps on the stone had seemed to shift into a parody of a human face, eyes staring and mouth open wide in terror or anguish. It had been somehow familiar to him, triggering memories that had slipped away a moment later. Funny, Gatts thinks now, how you can see things differently at night. He had been so startled he had dropped the thing, and when he picked it up again, it was a perfectly ordinary piece of stone. Nevertheless, he had been glad to hand it back to Griffith.   
He looks sideways at Griffith now, glancing at his chest, where the red stone is hidden behind armour. Gatts still isn’t quite sure what he’s doing in this company. Though he doesn’t like to admit it, he is fighting a losing battle against the implicit trust in Griffith that seems to have sprung fully formed from inside him on the day of their first meeting. Gatts doesn’t _like_ it, this irrational faith in someone who doesn’t know him well enough to have earned it. He shrugs mentally, loosening his grip on his horse’s reins. It’s not like he has anything more interesting to do at the moment and only time will tell if it’s worth staying with the Hawks.   
The regiments enter the city through the main gate on the south side, riding in under a great stone arch. Their mounts’ hooves clatter sharply against the paved streets, as they ride past people cheering on either side and throwing flowers at the soldiers. They pass the crowded, hive-like slums in the poorest part of the city, entering the more affluent quarters of Garima. Here, the buildings rise to improbable heights, decorated with arches, buttresses, minarets and turrets, in a dizzying medley of influences. Sun sparks off bright tiles and inlays of semi-precious stones, dazzling Gatts’ eyes. After the ascetically clean lines of southern architecture and the simple wood and stone houses of the middle regions, the opulent nature of Garima comes as a shock to him.  
Eventually, the spires of the King’s palace come into view. As they approach it, they pass a monolithic building of black stone, forbidding and cold even in the midday sun, its entrance guarded by blank-faced guards. ‘The Black Temple,’ Judeau tells him, seeing his curiosity. ‘The King is a devotee of Void.’ Gatts looks at the temple again, craning his neck to see long queues of supplicants lining up on the steps leading inside. Finally, they reach the army barracks on the far side of the royal palace. The Hawks are given accommodation in a less well-maintained part of the barracks, small enough that they are forced to bunk two to a room. Griffith delegates the room assignments to Corkus, who begins pairing men off quickly and efficiently. It seems to be tacitly accepted that Gatts will room with Griffith. Gatts doesn’t know how he feels about that. Once in their room, Griffith changes out of his travel stained gear into a silk shirt and soft expensive breeches. He invites Gatts to come with him and Casca as he makes his report to the King, and Gatts changes hastily into the only clean shirt he has left.  
They make a strange trio as they cross back across the barracks into the palace. Packed dirt gives way to tiled paths winding between precisely laid flowerbeds. Griffith leads them into a sand-coloured archway, cool between dark hedges of myrtle on either side, and they stop before one of the minor entrances of the palace.   
Guards admit them silently, knowing Griffith by sight. Griffith and Casca have been here before, it is clear; they walk confidently through high-ceilinged corridors, their heels clicking on marble floors. Gatts follows them, most of his attention given over to the expensive statues and ornaments lining the hallway. He feels very much like a boy from the country in these surroundings, the sounds of his feet seeming much too loud.  
They approach an ebony door guarded by two men in royal uniforms, who let them into a small antechamber. Inside, they wait in silence in front of the inner doors. Abruptly, it swings open to allow a heavyset man to exit. The furious expression on his face intensifies when he sees them, and he does not greet them.  
Griffith bows slightly, a minimally respectful gesture. The man’s face darkens further.  
‘Don’t imagine this little exploit of yours actually means anything!’ he says, pushing roughly past the three of them and out of the small room.  
Casca snorts once the door closes and exchanges a wry look with Griffith.   
‘Who was that and what’s his problem?’ Gatts asks.  
‘Prince Yurius. I’ll tell you about him later,’ Griffith replies, as the doors open to let them into a richly appointed room, where a careworn man sits on a jewel-encrusted throne. Walking up the length of the room, Gatts notices armoured men on either side. As they stand before the throne, Gatts bows low, following Casca and Griffith’s lead. Griffith straightens and begins to speak smoothly, giving an account of the battle and his unit’s role in it.  
The King’s attention is concentrated on Griffith, so Gatts is able to observe him at his leisure. The ruler of Midland has a long face surmounted by an ornate diadem. He nods occasionally at what Griffith tells him, but remains impassive for the most part. When Griffith is done, he nods once more, as if to punctuate the end of the account.  
‘You’ve done well, Griffith.’  
‘Thank you, your Majesty,’ Griffith says, with an expectant lilt on the last word.  
‘As I recall, I was to grant you permission to form your own band were this mission successful.’ The King sighs. ‘I can’t say I wouldn’t prefer you to continue working directly within the army hierarchy, but if this is what you want…’  
‘It is, your Majesty.’  
An expression of surprise crosses the King’s vague face, and he locks eyes with Griffith for a long moment. Gatts notices that the King’s tired eyes drop first. He looks away from Griffith and then back, his expression resigned.   
‘Very well, then. What will you call it?’  
‘The Band of the Hawk, your Majesty,’ comes the reply, without hesitation. ‘Further, I would like to request that you allow me to recruit the members of my current unit into the Band.’  
‘Done,’ says the King and stands to indicate the end of the audience. They bow once more and turn to leave the chamber.   
‘Griffith…’ the King says and they turn to look at him.   
‘Be careful.’  
Griffith nods slowly. ‘Yes,’ he says.   
He’s done it! Gatts thinks, as they walk back through the corridors. And with the thought, a sense of excitement, as of a great adventure begun, fills him. At his side, Casca is frowning in the way that means she is happy and trying to hide it, and ahead, Griffith is striding out of the palace, haloed by the light of the late afternoon sun.  
>

Back in their room, Griffith throws himself on his bed, exhaling deeply. Eyes closed, he looks younger. Not so sharp. Gatts watches him, unsurprised when Griffith opens his eyes to look at him.  
‘That went well, don’t you think?’  
Gatts shrugs. The question annoys him; it is falsely intimate in tone, and he is suddenly very aware of just how little he knows about Griffith.   
‘So suspicious, Gatts!’ Griffith is smiling now, as if genuinely pleased. ‘You don’t really trust me, do you?’  
‘No,’ Gatts replies shortly.   
‘Or is it that you don’t trust how you trust me?’   
Gatts stays silent, discomfited.  
Griffith falls back on the bed and flings an arm over his eyes. ‘I don’t trust how I trust you either,’ he continues. ‘I’m just waiting to see whether I should kill you or keep you.’  
‘What makes you think you could kill me? Or keep me?’  
The mouth under the concealing arm curves in a smile. ‘I don’t know. But I want you quite badly, and what I want, I generally get.’  
Gatts turns away, irate. ‘Just don’t try anything funny,’ he warns, stalking out of the room to the sound of laughter.  
>

When he returns, late at night, only the sound of Griffith’s even breaths breaks the quiet in the room. Gatts strips to his breeches and climbs into his bed. He has spent the night wandering blindly around Garima, into and out of taverns, drinking a fair amount and beating the shit out of the cutpurses foolish enough to think him easy game. And yet he is restless, tense in anticipation of a confrontation that has not materialized. Shifting uncomfortably, he finally leaps out of bed and shakes Griffith roughly.  
‘Get up,’ he growls.  
‘What?’ Griffith mumbles, justifiably not amused.  
‘I want to fight you.’  
Griffith gives him a long look and then sighs deeply. They pull their boots on in silence, not bothering with shirts, and walk down to the courtyard.   
They fight with all the ferocity they would show in battle, teeth bared and eyes intent. Gatts’ strength is compensated for by Griffith’s agility, and they circle around and around the courtyard, neither giving an inch.  
The moon dips lower and the fight continues. Their torsos are sheened with sweat now, and they breathe harshly with each stroke and parry. Eventually, they stumble to a halt out of mutual exhaustion, dropping their swords and gulping in air.  
‘Neither…of our… respective…pasts…may have…disposed…us to trust…anyone…Gatts,’ Griffith says between pants, his head down and his hands on his knees, ‘but…a man…has to…start…somewhere.’  
A smile grows on Gatts’ face. ‘Agreed,’ he says, ‘but I…might still…kill you.’  
‘I might…kill you…too, asshole,’ Griffith says. They would be laughing if they had the breath.  
>

It is a few nights after their return and Gatts is trying not to show his nervousness, as he follows Griffith into one of the major temples of Garima. The building is built out of pink sandstone, low but imposing, the carvings on the façade curving in elaborate patterns. Night is falling in the city and the pollution of a growing city contributes to a truly spectacular sunset.   
Inside the temple, old-fashioned oil lamps do not provide light so much as create shadow. Gatts stumbles on a rough patch on the floor, his eyes confused by the flickering light. They walk out of the entrance corridor and into a large chamber dominated by a huge statue of a woman with wings; this must be the goddess the temple is dedicated to. Slan, he thinks her name is. He strains his eyes in the dim light, but can’t make out the features of the idol. He hurries to keep up with Griffith as they cross the room.  
Religion has never played a large role in his life, so he was puzzled when Griffith insisted that they had to go to a temple that evening. In the village, most people said hasty prayers to favoured gods before embarking on voyages, and conducted small private ceremonies before the New Year and on some auspicious days, but that was the extent of religious observance. He was excluded from most of those events, since his foster parents believed his unfortunate birth made him a carrier of bad luck. Gatts has never seen a temple of the God Hand, the quartet of gods that seem to be so popular in this city.   
Griffith moves more slowly once they enter the warren of corridors behind the altar room, looking behind him and motioning at Gatts to catch up. Doors line the corridors they pass through, and the smell of incense fills the air. Moans sound from behind the closed doors, and Gatts blushes when he realises what they are. He is beginning to understand that Griffith is to be trusted least when he says something with a completely straight face.  
‘Why are we going?’ Gatts had asked.  
‘You’ve never had a woman, have you, Gatts?’ Griffith had replied, in an apparent non sequitur.   
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?’  
Griffith had only smiled.  
A hand shakes his shoulder and he is jolted abruptly back into the present. Griffith opens a door that appears no different from the others, and Gatts finds himself in a large room, mattresses and cushions covering the ground and lying on these in various states of undress are several girls, combing their hair and gossiping with each other idly. Gatts thinks his eyes must be the size of saucers. Griffith is watching him with amusement. A dark haired girl who seems older than the rest rises from the floor to embrace Griffith. They share a long lingering kiss, much to Gatts’ consternation.  
‘It’s been some time since you visited,’ the girl says.  
‘I was in the south, Lida. And, as you can see, I’ve brought a friend back with me.’ Griffith leans closer to whisper something in her ear and the girl – Lida – smiles.  
Griffith turns to Gatts. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he says, a smile twitching the edges of his mouth. Gatts’ own mouth falls open.  
‘What? You can’t leave me here!’ he says, before a soft but insistent hand turns his face away from Griffith’s retreating back and towards the girl’s face.  
‘Don’t worry,’ Lida says, ‘I’ll be very gentle.’ She leads him into a sheltered alcove, screened from outside view by heavy drapes. She pulls him down beside her, her face welcoming. Gatts doesn’t know what to think. The cloying smell in the air seems to be clouding his senses, making him comply when the girl pulls off his shirt, running her hands over his chest. Despite his misgivings, he begins to feel excited, hesitantly reaching to touch her in his own turn. Encouraged by the delighted smile she gives him, he reaches for her breasts and she arches into his hands.   
Very soon, he is breathing hard, supporting himself on trembling arms over Lida. They are both naked. She reaches down to guide him into her and he closes his eyes to better experience the feeling. He begins to move instinctively, helped by Lida’s soft hands on his back. Their urgency increases and he moves faster and harder. He opens his eyes when she cries out, only to recoil in shock. Rotting contorted features have replaced Lida’s youthful face, a black tongue lolling out as she moans. On her forehead, the tattoo denoting her status glows redly. Below, her body is suddenly more confining than welcoming, gripping him with mindless strength. He feels suddenly, irrationally, that his strength is flowing out of him into her, into a vast unnatural reservoir of power. Despite his horror, he is already too far gone, blacking out as he climaxes, too weak to avoid the grinning face reaching up to kiss him.   
>

The day is far advanced when Gatts wakes in the alcove. Lida is gone and he is too relieved to wonder where. He dresses quickly and walks out through the corridors, avoiding eye contact. Gatts can’t decide what he should feel about the previous night; his stomach roils uneasily as his mind swings between memories of the pleasure and the unnatural end of the encounter. He suspects that his childhood visions have come back to plague him in a new and inventive way, for there was surely no way that Lida could have transformed into the apparition he saw. Yes, it must surely have been a trick of his brain, confused by the heavy smoke and the dim light.  
On his way out, he can see the main altar to his right, on which the massive statue of Slan rests. At the base of the altar, devotees make offerings of flowers, incense and money. Finally able to get a good look at the idol in the dim afternoon light of the temple chamber, he sees that its stone face is contorted into a rictus smile of ecstasy, almost pain, exposing stone teeth and a smooth stone tongue. The body is nude, fully exposed, with obscenely detailed breasts and genitalia. Behind the torso, bat-like wings are stretched to their fullest extent, seeming to quiver in the humid air. The staring eyes trouble him, their expression cold and watchful, disjoint from the overwrought emotion of the rest of the statue. He shivers and turns to leave, the blazing heat of the Garima afternoon a relief after the disquieting atmosphere of the temple.  
>

Back at the barracks, he avoids the other Hawks’ questions as to where he has spent the night. In his room, he finds Griffith bending over a pile of requisitions on the desk. The pale face turns to him inquiringly and he begins to blush again, covering his embarrassment with a fierce, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’  
‘What? Didn’t you enjoy it?’ Griffith says, the tip of a pink tongue showing at the corner of his mouth.  
Gatts can’t find the words to reply. He hadn’t _disliked_ parts of it, certainly, but had he enjoyed it? He takes refuge in a question: ‘Why did you take me there?’  
‘Slan’s temple is known to be…helpful for men who are not…’ a sideways glance spears him, ‘particularly experienced or particularly attracted to women. For example, women are not my natural preference,’ Griffith says, ‘but this city seems to expect a certain type of behaviour from its public figures, so I find the Temple convenient. Lida knows that I rely on her to be less than discreet about my liaison with her.’  
‘Oh,’ says Gatts. ‘Um…thanks,’ he adds hastily, fumbling, ‘it was, it was…’  
Griffith’s mouth quirks. ‘You’re welcome,’ he says, taking pity on Gatts.   
>

The days pass quickly after their arrival in the city. Griffith and his inner circle work steadily to prepare the Band of the Hawk to ride out again, this time alone. For missions there will surely be; it is guaranteed by the interplay of court politics that Gatts is slowly coming to understand. The factions opposing Griffith, disturbed by this commoner taking the first step to ennoblement, will surely attempt to have him sent out on the most difficult and unrewarding excursions possible. The unpleasant Prince Yurius, whose young son Adonis is second in line to the throne, is doing his best to ensure this. On the other hand, Griffith has the tacit approval of a few powerful figures, most notably the King, although the Queen’s unexplained hostility towards Griffith constrains the King to show no overt signs of his favour. The priests remain watchfully neutral. Gatts finds himself grateful that they do not support Griffith, even though he knows they are an influential group.  
That power, in fact, is the problem. The more Gatts learns about the city, the less he likes the stranglehold the God Hand has on it. These four gods – Void, Slan, Ubik and Conrad – hold Garima possessively. New religions are not forbidden, but the temples of other gods tend to have problems with theft, vandalism and the harassment of their devotees. Very few of them have the tenacity or resources to continue proselytising in such an environment. Further, a large majority of Midland’s nobles worship one or more of the Four, and large donations help maintain their massive temple establishments.  
Gatts grows used to seeing small shrines to the Four on every other street corner. The priests of the God Hand move about the city with elaborate retinues and enjoy lifestyles as luxurious as those of the nobles. The temples themselves have an unsavoury reputation of dealing in more harmful material pleasures than those Gatts has experienced; Gatts is secretly sickened by the hordes of addicts that crowd the districts around the temples, begging money from the passers by or offering their bodies, desperate to obtain their daily dose of drugs from the temples. And then, at the back of his mind, is the queasy memory of the Temple of Desire, as Slan’s temple is known. He learns not to mention the God Hand in casual conversation: no one crosses the Four in Garima.  
He also learns, however, that others quietly share his distaste for them. On one occasion, he is returning with Pippin from a visit to buy horses for the Band. They step aside as a man calls loudly for the crowd to make way for his mistress. A litter is advancing down the street at a stately pace, surrounded by armed men and hung with expensive brocade curtains. The hangings part slightly as the litter passes them: someone inside is looking out, invisible to the crowd. Gatts can’t remember where he has seen the vaguely familiar insignia on the guard’s uniforms.   
‘Who was that?’ he asks Pippin as the crowd reforms around them and they continue on.  
‘Head Priestess of Slan,’ Pippin replies, his lip curling.  
‘Why the face?’ he asks, surprised by the normally stoic giant’s expression.   
‘Feared by the more _religious_ ,’ “stupid” is what his tone implies, ‘people in the city – they think she’s an avatar of Slan. Seems to me, she doesn’t do much besides exploit her devotees.’  
‘Huh,’ Gatts says, amazed by the sudden rush of words coming from Pippin. This is as much as he has ever heard him say at one time. He cranes his neck for a last look at the procession; this reminder of his deflowering arouses mixed feelings in him. Then he shrugs and moves on.  
When he tells Griffith about it, the other man looks amused. ‘Our Pippin turns very moral on this subject, Gatts.’   
‘You don’t believe in the God Hand, do you, Griffith?’  
‘No, but I do believe they’re useful. And if I have to chant and sway once in a while to remain in the King’s good graces, so be it,’ Griffith replies, shrugging dismissively.  
>

Weeks go by and Gatts’ first feelings of awe at the King’s city turn into disappointment quite rapidly. He is no longer impressed, or at least not very, by the excessive displays of wealth he sees. At least in the village, even the most despised child (which was him) never went hungry; the village elders would not have allowed it, although they turned a blind eye to the physical abuse he suffered. Here, children half his age tug at his shirt in the streets, thrusting their hips forward and pouting their lips in a way that does not disguise their protruding ribs or the hunger in their eyes. Disoriented and repulsed, Gatts buries himself in the Hawks’ preparations. Gatts still has no formal position within the Band, so he serves as an aide to Griffith and is a silent spectator at strategy meetings. He is wise enough to realise that he is working with an intellect far superior to his own.  
In public, Griffith continues to treat him in a casually offhand fashion, as Gatts imagines one would treat an old friend. He has nothing but his friendship with Madik with which to compare it, but he enjoys it anyway. Perhaps, he thinks, this is what it would be like to have a brother. Despite their apparent dissimilarity, Gatts thinks that he and Griffith are very alike in some ways; they are both scavengers become predators, wary and solitary. Griffith is adept at dealing with any number of men and women, and yet, when alone with Gatts, he is sometimes strangely awkward, as if wanting to be open, but fighting himself every step of the way. It might be insulting, were Gatts not experiencing the same himself. He recognises in it the backhanded compliment that they are paying each other. Both of them, so long accustomed to hiding what they feel instinctively, are beginning to fumble towards some sort of safe space with each other.  
He grows used to falling asleep with an arm over his eyes, since Griffith reads by lamplight late into the night. When Gatts wakes each morning, they walk silently down to the courtyard and fight each other to a standstill. Gatts will never read half the books Griffith has, and most of the time he can’t fathom what goes through his head, but he comes to understand his friend’s moods well.  
>

As the summer draws to an end, the machinations within the court produce a formal request to Griffith. The Hawks will have to travel southeast, to the border with Chuda, where border lords have their hands full the year round dealing with Chudan incursions on Midland territory. The Midland duke who holds the border in Merran province has reliable information from spies that indicates his Chudan counterpart’s army is moving towards his castle. The Band of the Hawk is requested to prevent the siege of the castle from taking place.  
Griffith confides to Gatts that they will very likely not arrive in time to forestall the siege. Gatts knows from his own experience with the Lizards that ousting the Chudans once they are installed around the castle will be far from easy. Early estimates of the army suggest that the Hawks will be outnumbered three to one. It will be a difficult, if not impossible, initiation for the Hawks, but they have little choice. All eyes in the court are turned upon them. Griffith accepts the mission within the hour it is presented to them and the Hawks ride for Merran the next morning.  
Two weeks’ hard riding gets them to the province. As predicted, the Chudans have already encircled the castle. The Hawks set up camp some distance away from the Chudans. Judeau, Griffith’s spymaster, manages to get a messenger through to the besieged lord. The situation is not yet desperate, but the enemy force is strong and has chosen an easily defensible position. Griffith decides that a surprise night attack is the only answer, before the Chudans have time to assess the Hawks’ strength and send for reinforcements.  
That night, the Hawks swoop down on the Chudan camp, killing unarmed soldiers from horseback and setting fire to tents. The Chudan general, who had not expected Griffith to attack so soon, is taken by surprise. Although they regroup rapidly, their advantage in numbers is eroded by the sudden attack. Griffith sounds the retreat and the Hawks gallop out of the camp, followed closely by the advancing Chudans. Once out of the camp, the main force of the Hawks takes one route towards the castle and Gatts’ cavalry contingent, led by Rickert, serves as a distraction, encouraging the enraged Chudans to pursue them.  
Galloping through the forest, they are soon in danger of being overtaken. Riding beside Rickert, Gatts sees the young scout glance behind him, trying to hide his panic. Gatts leans towards him and yells, ‘Keep going! I’ll hold them here!’ Rickert shakes his head, but Gatts, in no mood to be argued with, drops behind and wheels around, drawing his sword to face the enemy. At first incredulous that one single man remains to fight, the Chudans soon leap towards him with wild yells. Fending off attacks from a multitude of directions, Gatts fails to block a strike. It slashes his arm, which bleeds profusely. The pain is enough to propel him into berserker mode, the unnatural state where he can hack and kill with inhuman speed and strength, driven by the force of his rage. He loses count of the men falling before his sword, desperate to hold his ground and protect the Hawks, as he has promised he will. Eventually, reason returns and he realises that he can’t hold them off much longer. By now, he should have bought Rickert enough time to get to safety. He cuts down one final man and tugs on the reins, swerving sharply to gallop away from his attackers.  
Splashing through the stream, he can hear their horses hot on his heels. Soon, his horse leaps onto the banks and ahead into a clearing, finding Griffith in the centre. ‘To your right!’ Gatts hears him shout and obeys without question, pulling on the reins sharply to make the horse turn. Griffith rides with him and they reach the edge of the clearing. Behind them, explosions sound and Gatts turns to see hidden cannons spitting fire at the enemy soldiers. Without them realising it, Gatts has led them close to the castle they intended to take. Taken by surprise, their ranks are decimated in moments, men and horses alike falling lifeless to the ground. The few remaining men take to their heels, pursued by a yelling triumphant group of castle soldiers.   
Gatts breathes out slowly, his racing heart slowing to a normal pace, and dismounts from his panting horse. Griffith, already on the ground, comes over and claps him on the shoulder. ‘Well done.’  
‘Thanks.’  
Rickert interjects, breathlessly: ‘You should have seen him, Griffith! He took them on all by himself!’ He turns to Gatts. ‘You saved my life!’  
Gatts can feel himself beginning to blush.   
Griffith turns to the Hawks assembled in front of the castle. ‘From today,’ he says, raising his voice, ‘Gatts is Second Captain.’ To Gatts’ amazement, a cheer greets this pronouncement. He has been promoted to Griffith’s second. Grinning faces surround him and hands slap him on the back. Are all these men honestly happy for him? Someone hands him a cupful of wine and he raises it to his lips. Across from him, Griffith smiles and raises his own cup in salute. As he looks around, only Corkus and Casca look upset. That night, to the accompaniment of shouting and singing, Gatts celebrates his promotion, bewildered by his good fortune.


	4. Chapter 4

_Yottsu, Yomi e no michi-shirube_  
(Four, signpost for the land of the dead)

The Hawks’ first triumph ensures that they can begin their life as an independent mercenary group. Rather than return to the capital, Griffith keeps them moving around Midland, busy with the proposals pouring in from regional lords and wealthy town councils. They move from victory to victory and begin to gain a reputation. Griffith, a romantic figure on horseback, is soon a staple of gossip in several regions of Midland. An aura of invincibility begins to grow around the ‘White Hawk’ and his inner circle. Gatts learns that he has been nicknamed the ‘Century slayer’ after his exploit in Merran.  
He continues getting growing pains during the first year he spends with the Hawks. His clothes get too small too quickly, inches of ankle showing below his breeches before he notices. Actually, it is Judeau who notices, making some laughing comment to Pippin over the fire, and then he looks down and sees that it is true. So he goes to a tailor at the next town, with a couple of tagalongs, because privacy is an unknown thing in the band. And then he suffers through an old woman measuring every part of him with a frayed piece of string, with a chorus of smart-aleck comments in the background. Then he has new pants, a bit too long, because he doesn’t want to go through this again quickly. And a new vest, because his old one is getting too tight in the shoulders and chest.  
Judeau wolf-whistles when he sees him back at the camp, so Gatts gives him the finger and scowls, but doesn’t really mean it. Griffith raises pale brows and Casca smirks, and he extends the scowl to include them as well. He gives his old clothes to Rickert. They are too big to be of any use to him for a while, but there is no sense in throwing things with plenty of wear in them away. And anyway, Rickert likes them and wears the vest as a sort of jacket over his other clothes.   
It’s nice to wear clothes that aren’t stiff with dirt and blood and faded from infrequent washing. Even the slight roughness of the new cloth against his skin is nice, Gatts thinks as they ride away from the town. It only lasts till the next battle though, because he kills three men and they spray blood all over his new pants. He knew it would happen, has happened with every set of clothes he’s owned, but it still gives him a pang to see the blue cloth stained brown with blood after the battle. His clothes are the only things he owns, apart from his sword and his horse, that are not hand-me-downs. Or stolen.  
Gatts goes down to the river once they pitch camp after the battle, eager to wash the caked blood off his skin and clothes. As he nears the bank, he realises Griffith has beaten him to it, floating spread-eagled in the water. Griffith cannot have been there long: the blood dissolving off his skin has stained the water around him. Gatts strips and slips into the water with a splash, scrubbing his skin vigorously with his nails.  
‘Martin’s dead,’ Griffith says, not turning to look at Gatts.  
‘That little one?’ Gatts says regretfully. The boy had refused to be turned away at the last town at which they had recruited. He had cheerfully endured all manner of humiliations designed to make him leave and they had finally been forced to let him come along.  
‘I told his unit to keep him out of it. They said they did everything short of tying him up and he still managed to get into the middle of it.’   
‘They _should_ have tied him up!’  
‘Do you know, Gatts, I don’t think it would have mattered? This battle, the next one or the one after that – sooner or later, he would have managed it. He isn’t the first boy I’ve seen this happen to. I don’t know why they do it.’  
They are silent for a space. ‘I remember the first one who joined the Hawks. He was young enough that he used to carry around a little wooden knight – he hid it when he thought someone was looking, but everyone knew about it. I found him lying on the battlefield, but I couldn’t recognise him at first because his head was lying five feet away. With his doll.’  
‘What did you do?’ Gatts asks.  
‘I nearly broke down on the battlefield. I don’t know how long I would have stayed there if it hadn’t been for Casca; she took me away from there and fought me till I was tired enough to sleep.’  
Griffith rights himself and begins to squeeze the water out of his hair. He says, ‘Each time we fight, I think of that boy, and I think that there must be some better way than the stupid, _stupid_ way things are done now. I have to find it, Gatts, I must.’ Bleakly, he turns to Gatts. ‘How else can I justify these deaths?’  
They finish washing in silence and drag themselves up onto the bank to watch the sun sink behind the trees, as flocks of birds wing their way to rest.  
>  
Gatts doesn’t think of that day often. It doesn’t occur to him that on this precise date he understood why he followed Griffith. He might have registered a certain easing of some tension within him, the quieting of a restless urge to move on alone. Gatts knows he isn’t a leader. Oh, he fakes it well enough, slapping his men on their shoulders, doing his best not to get them killed, but Griffith is something different. Because what differentiates Griffith from him, and really, Gatts thinks, from everyone else he has ever met, is that Griffith moves through life towards a point no one else can see, eyes fixed on that and that alone.  
It had made Gatts nervous when he first met him, irritated and agitated him. On that morning all those years ago, he remembers wanting to say _why set yourself up for this?_ And with any of a million fools, he would have been right to give that advice. But not with Griffith. No, not with Griffith, because his strange unexpected friend, simultaneously a cynic and an idealist, is going to do what he set out to do. This, Gatts now believes absolutely and the belief settles in him comfortably, securely, flowing through his thoughts and the fabric of his days, until he cannot remember what it was like not to believe in Griffith.   
>

That winter, the Hawks move on to a town in a northern province. They stay in the main inn, because the innkeeper is the mayor and he wants them to get rid of a pack of raiders. It is a smaller job than they normally do, but pickings are slim this season. All of them are aware that it will take many bread-and-butter excursions before they gain enough experience for the King to call them back into his service for the meatier missions that will make their fortune. Meanwhile, they’ll take what they can get.  
In this particular case, they get nice rooms and everything, which tells Gatts that the townspeople _really_ want the raiders gone. Everyone has to double up except Casca. He makes a mental note to avoid her room: ever since he has been promoted to Griffith’s second, she has been impossible to live with. The higher he rises in the Band’s esteem, the more Casca’s antipathy to him seems to increase. He puts it down to the same sort of jealousy that Corkus displays, and is secretly disappointed: he had thought better of her. He shares a room, as usual, with Griffith, which he likes because Griffith is warm and doesn’t steal the blankets or snore.   
It isn’t hard to find the raiders’ spy in the town. They search the town’s guard wall for hidden exits before coming into town, and set a little surprise outside each of them. Come morning, Rickert’s patrol finds a miserable kid shivering in one of the pits. When they get him out and tie him up, Gatts can see that the boy is maybe older than he is, but he still seems like a kid. The boy nearly pisses himself, too, when Pippin starts in on him, and squeals quickly. The boy cries like a baby while he tells them where the raiders’ hideout in the forest is. Turns out that he’s a bum boy for one of them. Pretty enough for it, with big brown eyes and a soft mouth. The Hawks take him, trussed like a pig, to the village elders, so that he doesn’t run screaming to his friends.   
It takes an hour to get the Hawks together and out to the forest, but it doesn’t take them long to clean the raiders up once they get there. Not much of a fight, and they even get the leader – a fat old bastard, with a mean look on his bearded face – alive to give to the townspeople.   
They stay another night in the town and get drunk at the mayor’s expense. Late at night, Gatts reels upstairs with a splitting headache to find Griffith sitting on the windowsill of their room’s single window. He’s been in a bad mood ever since they found the boy. If it were anyone else, Gatts would know how to get him out of it, but when Griffith goes into a funk, it’s better just to stay the fuck out of the way. So Gatts gets into bed and tries to sleep. But he can’t, because he can feel Griffith being unhappy at the window. So he says (even though he knows it’s stupid), ‘You okay?’  
There is a long silence. He hears footsteps coming closer to the bed, and a rustling of clothes. Griffith slides between the sheets behind him and then Gatts can feel him against his back. Griffith isn’t wearing anything.  
‘No.’  
Gatts turns to him and Griffith’s mouth comes down on his. Gatts jerks back instinctively. There is enough moonlight that he can see Griffith looking at him, eyes pale and questioning. Then Griffith turns his back to him and goes to sleep. After a while, Gatts gets out of the bed and leaves the room, too restless to fall asleep.  
Walking down dark stairs and out of the inn, he shivers in the cold and fills his lungs with the crisp air. He walks to the stables, his feet crunching through the snow. Once inside, he can see a small lamp flickering in one of the stalls. Surprised that someone else is up at this late hour, he peers into the stall, leaning over the edge. Then he wishes he hadn’t, because Casca is in the stall and she’s crying, leaning against the side of her horse. It is too late for him to pretend he hasn’t seen her. He stands there uncomfortably, bathed in her teary glare. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demands, her voice accusing.   
‘Why shouldn’t I be here?’ he shoots back, then bites his lip. As always, she is able to get under his skin despite his best intentions and he is far from calm right now.  
‘What’s wrong?’ she sneers, ‘don’t you have to go suck up to Griffith? You must’ve been away for a whole quarter candle-mark now!’  
The sheer venom in her voice surprises him. There has always been hostility under the surface when she talks to him, but she has never displayed it so openly.  
‘Griffith’s golden boy!’ she spits, ‘the man who killed a hundred Chudans! The man with the biggest sword in Midland. What are you compensating for, Gatts?’  
‘Nothing,’ he says, angry in his own turn. ‘What are _you_ compensating for, Casca? Why are you such a bitch all the time? Do you think it makes you look tough? Do you think being a woman makes you special?’  
‘And what are you, what’s so special about you?’  
He stays silent, compressing his lips.  
‘All you have going for you is that he met you before he met me!’ she continues, the words seeming to spill out, as if long suppressed. ‘I never had a chance! All you do is take and take and take. You came in here and you took away the only thing that ever mattered to me!’  
‘ _What?_ ’ says Gatts, goaded into responding, ‘What the hell have I ever taken from you?’  
‘Everything!’ she says and her face crumples in misery. ‘ _I_ was Griffith’s second before you came. _I_ was his right hand. What right did you have to take that away from me?’ Her voice trails into silence on those last words and Gatts has to strain to hear her.  
They are both quiet for some time, unable to speak. Gatts tries not to look at the tears dripping down Casca’s cheeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ Gatts says, finally, ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t think of it that way.’ He really _is_ sorry, somewhat to his own surprise; he knows what it’s like to feel unwanted.  
Casca looks at him searchingly, as if suspecting him of mocking her. There is a long silence, while she appears to be struggling with herself. ‘I…I guess you earned it. I’m not as strong as you are,’ she says at last, unsteadily. ‘I don’t think he needs me anymore.’  
‘Don’t say that! He relies on you, just as much as on me.’  
She makes a negating gesture with one hand. ‘He doesn’t depend on anyone or anything. He never has.’ And, very low: ‘But I think he might need you.’  
They don’t talk any more, but Gatts stays to groom his own horse. The silence is not companionable, but not tense either. Eventually, she leaves for her room and he follows her example soon after. His room is silent when he enters it and he slips into bed as unobtrusively as possible. Griffith doesn’t stir.  
>

In the morning Gatts wonders if the previous night was a dream, because Griffith acts the same as always. He is just Griffith again, and the strange boy Gatts saw the night before is gone.  
The Hawks get paid right before they leave the town. Riding past the main square, they see the raiders hanging from hastily erected gibbets and the boy they caught the day before along with them. His dead face is turned towards them, bulging eyes staring. He has probably been hung last, because there are shining tear tracks over the bruises on his face and the livid brand on his left cheek. The brand is messy, not a clean job at all. Gatts supposes that the townspeople were more than a little upset when the Hawks had handed him over to them.  
>

Gatts feels that things are just the same between him and Griffith after that. There is no reason why they shouldn’t be. After all, there are plenty of people who swing that way, and, well, if they’d rather screw another man than a woman, that’s their business. It’s just not the way he is, he tells himself. It doesn’t count that he thinks about the way Griffith had felt against his back sometimes, because everyone thinks of crazy shit once in a while, especially when they’re always horny. The one good thing about that peculiar night is that Casca has stopped treating him like a plague carrier. He doubts they will ever be friends, but an armed truce is better than nothing.  
They ride on through increasingly bad weather in the following weeks. The sky settles to a nondescript grey colour, occasionally darkening to pour freezing rain on them. Gatts decides that he much prefers the Southern provinces, conveniently blurring his memories of the sand flies and the heat.  
Griffith decides the Hawks should winter in the next town; heavy snows have set in and there is little work to be had anywhere. Gatts thinks it’s nice at first, waking up in the same bed everyday (for once, a bed without fleas) to see windows white with frost, knowing that he’ll spend the day doing nothing at all. All the Hawks are pretty flush with cash after their recent jobs, and most of them try to spend it as fast as they can, on cards, drink and women. Especially women.  
Judeau, Corkus and Gatts get drunk one night. The next thing he knows, he is rolling around on a straw tick in the local brothel with a drunken whore with six hands. He has a pretty good time, and it is as good a way as any to make the days pass, so he comes back often. The whore recognises him the second time and makes a fuss over him, which he pretends not to enjoy. Not that anyone notices – Judeau has his hands full with a curvy little brunette and Corkus and Pippin are chatting up the bored pair of women tending bar.  
The whore’s name is Suzara, which tips Gatts off that she’s Chudan. She has brown skin and uneven teeth that show white when she smiles. Looks like Casca, except a lot fatter and older. She and Gatts get into the habit of talking after fucking in the afternoons. Or rather, she talks and Gatts listens. It is warm in her room, and comfortable, even if the blankets smell a bit. Gatts likes to lie with his arm behind her back and her head on his shoulder. It is far cry from the uneasy ecstasy he experienced in Slan’s temple and he prefers it this way.  
She tells him that she followed a Midland trader out of Chuda when she was young and he left her pregnant in this town. The child is older than Gatts is, she says, and doing well as a carpenter in a village not too far away. He is a good boy who tries not to show that she embarrasses him. She gets a sad look in her eyes when she says this, so Gatts tickles her until she laughs and her stomach and thighs shake like jelly. This has a different effect on certain parts of his body, so they end up fucking again.  
Suzara tells him about Chuda, too. Says it’s warm, so hot that you can cook your food on the rocks in the summer. That people wear long white robes, even the men, and go to temples to pray three times a day. That the city she is from is famous for its silk and saffron, which is sold in sprawling open-air bazaars. You can wander for days in these places, she says, they are so huge. The sellers have a way of snapping the cloth out from its folds so that it floats down slowly; on a busy day, the air is full of cloth in all colours. Gatts often goes back to the inn still thinking of camels and elephants and green-gold banners of cloth waving in the air.  
When Gatts comes back late at night, drunk stupid, he is likely to find Griffith reading a book by lamplight in their room. Griffith has struck up a friendship with the local priest, of all people, a quiet grey-haired man who argues passionately about a great many issues and lends Griffith books. Gatts has an uneasy feeling that he becomes maudlin on some of these late nights, but he can never remember the next day and Griffith never tells him anything when he asks, but he always has a little smirk on his face on those days.  
On the day that Gatts is bored enough to begin drinking early in the morning, he comes back nauseated in the early afternoon, brushing past Griffith and collapsing onto his bed, his head spinning. Vaguely, he hears Griffith place something – a basin, no doubt – next to his bed and then retreat to his own side of the room. Gatts dreams confusedly, of scenes washed in red that fade to black, leaving him aware only of his own breathing. Slowly, he transitions between sleep and awareness, two voices coiling around each other in his head. He cracks gummy eyes open to see Griffith and the priest sitting at the fire, heads bent over a text.  
‘“Therefore a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only,”1’ Griffith reads slowly.  
‘“Nevertheless he ought to be slow to believe and to act, nor should he himself show fear, but proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable,”’ the priest continues, his low, sweet voice making the words hang in the air.  
‘“Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.” _That_ I agree with,’ Griffith says.   
‘There I must part ways with you, Griffith,’ replies the priest. ‘One cannot rule people whom one despises.’   
‘But do you not agree, Father, that most people do not know what is best for them? And if one has only their best interests at heart, then could not a little fear be forgiven?’  
‘I think you will find that most people manage their affairs decently and humanely if they are only left in peace. It is when great causes come into their lives that they turn insecure and unruly.’  
‘You have a great deal more faith in people than I do,’ Griffith says, sounding rather sad.  
The priest rests a bony hand on Griffith’s head, stroking lightly from the crown to the nape. ‘I wish I had had the teaching of you when you were younger, Griffith.’  
Griffith laughs. ‘So that I might not sound quite so cynical?’  
‘Because I have often wished for a student like you. I will miss you when you leave, you know.’  
‘And I you, Father.’  
Gatts closes his eyes again and is lulled back to sleep by their low voices.  
>

Their enforced rest comes to an end just as Gatts begins to feel he might chew his own arm off with boredom. The other Hawks are restless as well and Casca begins fighting with Corkus three times a day, so it’s clear that things have to start moving soon. One day, as the snow begins melting in the spring rains, a runner comes for Griffith with a message from a baron in the castle town two hundred miles east. The baron needs the Hawks to reinforce his attack on another noble. Ah, bickering lords in the springtime – it brings back old memories for Gatts. Griffith agrees to take the job, telling the runner that they will arrive at the castle in a week’s time.  
The Hawks ride the next day. The night before, Gatts says an awkward goodbye to Suzara who takes the news of his departure stoically, although her eyes are suspiciously moist. He doesn’t tell her that he will return and she doesn’t ask him to. He gives her a length of red silk; he picked it up earlier thinking of the cloth bazaars in her homeland. She tells him that she will make a dress out of it and think of him when she wears it.  
>

They reach the baron’s castle within the promised week. The noble is a tall blond man with an urbane manner. He talks to Griffith and the other Hawks courteously, though he can never quite rid his manner of the slight hauteur customary to most high-borns. The incursion onto his neighbour’s territory is accomplished quite easily; possibly, a man less used to hedging his bets would not have hired them at all.  
The successful attack is celebrated with a ball at the castle. The Hawk officers are invited, though it becomes quickly apparent that they are to function as dangerously exotic novelties for the other guests to gawk at discreetly. Uncomfortable at the attention he is getting, Gatts retreats into a corner with a glass of wine, scowling fiercely to deter anyone from approaching him. Across the ballroom, he can see Rickert and Judeau looking panicked and fending off a bevy of noblewomen. In another corner of the room, Casca’s eyes are narrowing in a way that should be a warning to the drunkard trying to look down the neck of her shirt. He lets his gaze trail slowly across the chamber, stopping at the windows leading out onto the stone terrace, where a group of men standing around Griffith are enjoying a lively conversation.  
Unlike the rest of the Hawks, Griffith seems neither out of place nor uncomfortable in this situation. He is speaking now and if the smiles on the faces of the men around him are anything to go by what he is saying is witty, sophisticated and amusing. The baron himself is standing next to Griffith, looking at him with what might be considered almost a proprietary air. As Gatts watches, the nobleman says something that makes the other men move on, leaving Griffith and the baron standing alone beside the windows. Subtly, the attitude of the baron changes, one hand descending on Griffith’s shoulder in a way that might be considered only friendly – if you neglected to study his expression carefully. With his free hand, the man gestures toward the terrace, bending to speak softly into Griffith’s ear. Griffith shakes his head in reply, smoothly disengaging himself from the baron’s grip and giving him a rueful smile. Gatts watches as the noble shrugs resignedly.  
Later Gatts asks Griffith why he didn’t go with the baron. ‘He wasn’t bad-looking,’ he adds teasingly. There is a tense silence and then a sharp ‘Use your head!’   
Lying awake that night, Gatts decides that he deserved it. He hasn’t realised till now the special difficulties inherent in Griffith’s position. It is an open secret that half the nobles in Midland keep catamites, but Griffith’s background with Gennon and his low rank make it impossible for him to contemplate an open relationship with another man. It would make him a laughingstock.   
There is always the option of the boy prostitutes who haunt certain areas of the towns they pass, their painted faces turned hopefully toward passers by, but Griffith always moves past them as though he doesn’t see them. Gatts secretly suspects that he sees too much of himself as he was, before the Hawks and before Gennon, in these boys to view them with any sort of comfort. Gatts spends the rest of the night sleepless, contemplating the extent of Griffith’s loneliness.  
>

Gradually, the Band of the Hawks’ reputation grows. Their record is unblemished by defeat so far and they begin to have the luxury of refusing less lucrative or important missions. Gatts settles into his role as Second Captain, beginning to feel truly responsible for the men under his command. The responsibility tempers him and gives him steadiness; he finds that he is less likely now to lash out in anger. His men depend upon him increasingly, which he takes as a compliment, but which also makes him more deliberate in making his decisions. It is now more important than ever that he make the right decisions: he doesn’t want to see his men’s dead faces in his mind’s eye because he moved wrongly or too fast. Casca approves of the change in him and stops chiding him for being too reckless. Occasionally, they have a whole conversation without arguing.   
Griffith, in their third year away from the capital, seems slightly more on edge. He is waiting, he tells Gatts, for the King to recall them to Garima. He refuses mission after mission, and the Hawks remain camped in Siova, kicking their heels. One day, Gatts finds him in his tent, reading a letter and smiling. The indefinable tension has eased from his face. ‘This is it,’ he tells Gatts, waving the letter, ‘our final test.’  
‘What impossible thing do we have to do this time?’  
Griffith smiles wider. ‘Nothing very hard. Simply capture the Korai.’  
‘What!’ Gatts says, aghast. The Black Fortress holds the reputation of being one of the most secure and well-guarded outposts of the Chudan Empire. The citadel is on the edge of the barren plateau overlooking the plain of Midland’s fertile central province. The river flowing parallel to the edge of the plateau only provides a second barrier to attackers. From this vantage point, the Chudans can see any advancing force well in time to erect their defences. No Midland army has ever taken it.  
‘There’s no way we can do it, Griffith!’   
‘Oh, but there is. There are certain factors about this situation that our dear Prince Yurius, who I am certain is behind this, has neglected to take into account.’ Gatts looks inquiring. ‘The Chudans have become lazy about the Korai; they deploy their least experienced forces there, in the confidence that the location of the fortress will hold off all attackers. Secondly, every other Midland attack on this place has involved at least three army regiments and has been seen coming for miles. We are fewer and much faster. They will get little warning of our advance. Lastly,’ and here Griffith smiles, ‘regarding the general in charge of the fortress, there is reason for me to believe that his thinking may not be completely unclouded when it comes to… the Hawks.’  
>

Despite Griffith’s explanation, Gatts remains uncertain. Griffith refuses to expand on his previous association with the general in charge of the Korai. Judeau, Corkus and Pippin appear to share his misgivings, but they complete preparations for the journey in record time and do not let their doubts show to the other Hawks. Gatts reminds his platoon leaders of their past record of success and tells them to trust Griffith. Most of the soldiers are happy to believe him.   
They travel to the Argun plateau at breakneck speed. If Chudan spies have penetrated the Midland court, they will give them as little time as possible to get word to the Korai. They avoid the villages en route to the fortress, knowing that these will have links with the stronghold. Shortly, they are camped on the incline leading up to the plateau, a short distance away from the river. Griffith tells the senior officers that the attack will take place the next morning. Even Casca, who customarily carries out Griffith’s orders as if they were her own, is moved to ask for clarification. Surely they will not simply attack the fortress directly?  
Well, yes, apparently they will, according to Griffith. Pointing with a stick to the map, he tells them that they will be crossing the river the next day. Then the large majority of the Hawks will draw the garrison’s defenders out, while a small hidden force waits in reserve to the side. Gatts can’t understand it; the most elementary military tactics forbid cutting off your own line of retreat, as Griffith is proposing to do by putting the river at their backs. And why should the Chudans come out at all, when they can stay safely behind their walls? Griffith knows all this; why is he planning to attack in this way?   
Gatts begins to object, only to be cut off by Griffith. ‘If you’ve trusted me to lead you this far, then trust me again tomorrow. Have your troops ready for the attack, but don’t tell them what we’re going to do.’ And with that, the meeting is over; only Casca, who will lead the reserve force, is asked to stay. Outside the tent, Judeau shrugs and laughs a little, expressing their collective confusion.  
Even so, they do their duty. The next morning, the Hawks cross the river and face the fortress. To Gatts’ amazement, the vast gate guarding the citadel opens and soldiers begin to march out, forming line upon line of a vast human rectangle. When the gate eventually swings shut again, a force fully four times the strength of the Hawks is facing them. Murmurs of disquiet begin within the ranks as Griffith rides to the front to address them. He is distinctive in white and silver and his voice is clear and sure.  
‘Today, we are going to take the Korai. You will be fighting an army many times your own size. There is a river behind you and nowhere to run. So, today, you are not fighting for your cut of the profits. You are fighting for your life. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. So fight well and fight to live!’  
As he speaks, the Hawks straighten on their mounts. Griffith pulls on his horse’s reins, facing forward and securing his helmet. He raises his sword high up in the air and sweeps it down to his right: ‘Attack!’  
>

A day later, Gatts thinks of the battle with wonder. The Hawks had attacked with all the fury of cornered beasts and been met by half-trained soldiers and green recruits. Slashing his way through the Chudan ranks, Gatts was incredulous when he realised that the Chudans were trying to capture Griffith alive. Later, he learnt that the Chudan commander had offered a reward to any man who brought him the leader of the Hawks unharmed. The confusion and greed this offer incited in the Chudan ranks badly hampered their ability to push back the Hawks, but as more and more Chudans died, reinforcements were brought out of the fortress, much to the Hawks’ dismay. Their strength flagging, they looked to be overwhelmed by the Chudans’ superior numbers. At that point, Gatts had begun moving at that point towards Griffith, acting instinctively to protect his leader.   
The Hawks began looking increasingly desperate, fending off the Chudan soldiers with their remaining strength. The Chudans, sensing their advantage, took the opportunity to tighten their ranks and push back with vigour. Gatts was grimly pushing forward towards Griffith, when a shout brought his head up and toward the fortress. There, in front of his unbelieving eyes, the blue and silver flag of the Hawks was waving gaily in place of the Chudan standard and grinning Hawks lined the ramparts. The stunned Chudans realised they were caught in the jaws of a trap. Throwing down their weapons, they began surrendering voluntarily. Shortly after that, the Battle of the Korai was over.  
Riding into the keep, Gatts had found Casca’s men firmly in control of the fortress. It could not have been difficult to subdue the skeleton force that remained inside once the commander made the tactical error of sending the bulk of his army outside the protection of the fortress. Small as the reserve force had been, they were able to take control of the stronghold quite efficiently. Casca herself had sustained a flesh wound in her left arm and was tired, but triumphant. Griffith had hugged her gently, congratulating her on a job well done, and Gatts had turned away, the look in her eyes making him feel he was intruding on a private moment.  
The Chudan general remained securely guarded in a storeroom till later that day. He had been brought before Griffith for judgment, a gaunt man shaking with fear and less than impressive in defeat. He had smiled at Griffith, his thin mouth twitching nervously.  
‘Gri…Griffith. It’s good to see you, my boy,’ he said, in a tone that tried and failed to be avuncular. ‘It’s been such a long time. Do tell these ruffians to stop manhandling me.’  
‘You will be executed at nightfall, along with the other captured officers,’ Griffith said, his voice cold.  
‘But, Griffith! You-,’ and he was cut off by Griffith’s hand slicing through the air. His nerve visibly oozed out of him.  
‘Take him away.’  
The general was dragged away, still trying to choke out his plea for mercy. Griffith’s face had an expression of faint distaste on it and Gatts began to have an inkling of what the connection between the two might have been. If he was right, Griffith had played the man with consummate skill in this entire affair.  
Though Gatts doesn’t quite admit it to himself, the memory of Griffith’s face as he looked at the general chills him a little. He doesn’t know why, when he has seen Griffith’s ruthlessness demonstrated in so many other ways and it has never bothered him. But there had been just a hint of satisfaction behind the coldness, as of an item checked off a long list of humiliations and injuries suffered. Griffith rarely speaks of his pre-Hawk days. Sometimes, Gatts is grateful for that.  
Someone calls his name, jerking Gatts out of his memories of the day before. ‘We’re going back,’ Corkus says, his normally sour face lit up with a grin. ‘The King has called us back! Griffith is to be knighted!’  
>

They ride into streets lined with crowds even thicker and more raucous than those that had greeted Gatts on his first entrance into Garima. The officers ride behind Griffith, half-blinded by the showers of flower petals being thrown at them by cheering men and women. Even in the wealthier quarters leading up to the palace, the normally indifferent noblewomen are out on their balconies, showering them with more expensive rose petals and ribbons. They are led straight in to the throne room this time, and Gatts gapes at the number of people already inside. Griffith walks straight up to the throne, looking neither to the left nor the right, as his officers follow him. The King rises and the flat of his ceremonial sword strikes each of Griffith’s shoulders, as he pronounces him a knight of the realm. Tired as he is, the rest of the ceremony passes in a blur for Gatts.  
The same evening, the Hawk officers, dressed in their best, make their way back to the palace. Their men are busy celebrating their return in taverns all over Garima, their discipline for once thrown to the winds. Gatts, uncomfortable in the expensive getup he has been forced to buy and wear, wishes he was helping Gaston in his avowed intention of drinking at every tavern in the city, instead of going to the ball organised in honour of their victory. At least one person, however, is even more uncomfortable than he is: Casca is wearing a dress!   
Any impression of gentle femininity this might give her, however, is destroyed by the ferocious expression on her face. Her fellow officers are wise enough not to comment on the dress, but amusement is plain on their faces, which seems to infuriate her further. Actually, Gatts thinks she looks pretty in it; the roses lining the bodice match the flush in her cheeks, and there is a rose tucked behind her ear as well. Judeau seems to share his opinion, sneaking surreptitious looks at Casca when she isn’t looking.  
The ball goes as Gatts expects it to go. Hour after hour crawls by with agonizing slowness and he follows his time-tested survival method, acquiring a large amount of alcohol and retreating into an isolated corner to drink it, first alone and then joined by Judeau, who is trying to get up the nerve to ask Casca to dance. From their refuge, they can see Griffith being introduced to a young woman surrounded by an unusually large number of attendants.  
‘Who’s that?’ asks Gatts.  
‘Princess Charlotte,’ replies Judeau, tugging at his neat blond ponytail, his mind obviously elsewhere. The object of his thoughts is attempting to hide behind a pillar on the opposite side of the ballroom.  
Gatts watches as Griffith bends over the Princess’s hand and then rises to give her a charming smile. The Princess, flustered, blushes and doesn’t seem to know how to respond. Around her, her duennas look charmed as Griffith begins talking again and, slowly, the Princess dares to look up and participate in conversation once again. Gatts is beginning to understand that Griffith’s ambitions may be more far-reaching than anyone imagines.  
The evening drags on as candles burn down and are replaced. At one point, the unmarried girls exit the ballroom, deemed too young to stay past a certain hour. Judeau asks Casca for a dance and is refused, but not unkindly. Gatts thinks she may even be flattered under her gruff exterior. Eventually, the King and Queen make their exit, as everyone in the room bows or curtseys low. With the royal couple’s departure a change seems to come over the room. There is a hush, as though the assembled nobles are waiting for something. A woman in red raises her hands for silence, as a gaunt man in black robes opens his mouth to speak.  
‘In honour of Sir Griffith’s victory, the followers of Void and Slan would like to invite all of you to a private celebration in the Temple of Void,’ the man says, his voice low and sonorous. It is Dhoval, the High Priest of Void, which must mean that the woman is the High Priestess of Slan, whose litter he had seen long months ago in the city.  
An excited buzz rises, as nobles begin to hurry out of the ballroom to hail their carriages. Gatts looks around in confusion, but the other Hawks look equally bewildered. One by one, they decide to return to the barracks or move on to a tavern for a real celebration.  
‘Let’s get out of here, Griffith,’ Gatts says.  
Griffith grips him by the shoulders. ‘Don’t you realise what this is? They’re finally letting me in. This is it!’  
‘This is something that I don’t know if you want to get involved in. I don’t trust that pair, or anything to do with the God Hand,’ Gatts says in a low voice.  
Griffith’s cheeks are faintly flushed, his eyes triumphant. ‘Don’t be naïve, Gatts! There is only so high you can go without the God Hand’s favour…’  
‘You know what these people are. Can you honestly tell me you want to link yourself to them?’  
Griffith’s eyes drop and he is silent for a long moment.  
When he speaks again, there is no hesitation in his voice. ‘I have to go, Gatts. You can come with me or not. Your choice.’  
Gatts decides to stay with him, uneasy and unable to articulate clearly what he feels. Unbalanced, perhaps, as though the night marks a turning point of some sort, and he has taken the wrong turn without knowing it.  
The Black Temple, when they reach it, is no less forbidding at night than it appears in the daytime. As they walk towards it, Gatts has the fanciful impression that he is falling into an abyss, in spite of the illumination provided by torches held by the guards. They are admitted into the temple as soon as the guards can see their faces. Inside, the temple is built on bigger lines than that of Slan, its obsidian walls reaching up to heights that the torches in wall sconces are unable to illuminate. As they follow their guide further into the temple, the ground begins to slope down gently under their feet. Gatts realises that they are moving underground. He loses track of the turns they take until they finally pass through doors leading into a tunnel, which in turn leads into a vast cavern. One part of his mind wonders how it is physically possible; the structure should have collapsed with this under it. Pillars stretch back further than he can see and the ceiling is lost in blackness.  
In the flickering light of innumerable candles and lamps, the cream of Garima society is disporting itself with abandon. Gatts, shocked, recognises the faces of several high-ranking nobles. Some are fondling half-nude slave girls, while their stiff-backed wives emulate them with the slaves’ male counterparts. There are pedestals erected among the mattresses and carpets lining the floor, where nubile bodies seem to be performing various sexual acts for the amusement of the spectators. The only area left bare is a sort of pit at the back of the room, behind which is a massive altar of black stone.  
Beside him, Griffith appears to be collecting his thoughts, an impassive expression on his face. Gatts is about to suggest that they beat a hasty retreat before someone notices them, when he realises someone already has. The High Priestess is moving towards them, her red robes half undone and trailing on the ground behind her. Gatts tries desperately to ignore the generous expanse of torso she is displaying.  
‘I’m so glad you could join us, Sir Griffith,’ she says. ‘May I call you Griffith?’ Griffith nods, and she turns to Gatts, ‘And this, of course, is Gatts, your second. May I say how very much I admire your exploits on the field? You must both call me Iruva.’ In spite of her addressing her last remarks to Gatts, her eyes are already drifting back to Griffith’s face. Another voice rumbles, ‘Sir Griffith, we have been following your career with a tremendous degree of interest these past months.’ The cadaverous face of the High Priest appears over the Priestess’s shoulder, only adding to Gatts’ unease.  
‘Thank you,’ Griffith replies. ‘I am flattered.’  
‘You really must come and tell us all about this latest battle,’ the Priestess says, linking her arm with Griffith’s. Gatts has no choice but to follow them as they move towards the far end of the room. The High Priest follows silently by his side.   
They reach a cushioned mattress on the floor and the woman sinks down on it gracefully, patting the space beside her invitingly. Griffith sits down, while the High Priest leads Gatts to another mattress. Looking back over his shoulder, Gatts sees the Priestess put her hand on Griffith’s knee. There is something about her that makes Gatts uneasy, in spite of her vapid smile and her insipid conversation. Perhaps because she seems to be playing at maintaining this _rôle_ , her imitation of a well-bred Midland noblewoman belied by the expression in her eyes.  
‘I’m sorry?’ he says, realising he has missed the better part of what the High Priest is saying to him.   
A ghastly-looking smile is aimed at him, as the man repeats what he said earlier: ‘Would you like a girl?’  
‘Er..no. No, that’s really all right. I’ll just…sit here and…don’t let me detain you, please,’ Gatts says, his concentration in shreds.  
The man nods again and moves away, leaving Gatts free to observe Griffith and the Priestess covertly. Not that it matters, since at this point Griffith and the woman appear to be engaged in a staring contest. Griffith drops his eyes first and nods, agreeing to something. His companion smiles and matters progress rapidly to a point where they would not notice if the whole room were watching them.  
As more and more of their pale flesh comes into view, Gatts finally gives up, turns tail and flees. A stone-faced guard leads him out of the temple and he walks to the Drunken Goat, the tavern the Hawks are fond of frequenting. Once inside, he calls for a beer and presses the mug, damp with condensation, against the side of his face. Flashes of the scene he has just escaped from appear randomly in his mind, ensuring a constant blush on his cheeks. He closes his eyes and shakes his head, trying to dislodge the memory of the Priestess’s red mouth moving down Griffith’s chest in a series of sucking kisses.  
Someone sits down across from him and he opens his eyes to find Pippin there. ‘Hey,’ he says.  
Pippin nods in reply: he rarely speaks if he can help it. He points at Gatts and raises his eyebrows questioningly.  
Gatts sighs. ‘Don’t ask.’  
Pippin shrugs his okay and they drink in a companionable silence. ‘Did you enjoy yourself tonight?’ Gatts asks. Pippin shrugs again: not really.  
‘I wish we were back in the provinces.’ Gatts says, ‘I really don’t like this city.’  
Pippin’s mouth quirks in his version of a smile. ‘I think we’ll be here a while,’ he says.  
‘I know. Fuck it all to hell,’ Gatts mutters. Then he sighs. ‘Well, I suppose we’ll all be better off for it. I can’t believe it: Griffith, a knight!’  
Pippin shrugs again. This time, Gatts can’t make out what he is trying to convey. Outside the tavern the sky is lightening from the blue-black of night to the roseate shades of dawn.  
>   
Griffith returns late in the day, perfectly groomed and seemingly composed. Gatts looks at him and continues sharpening his sword.  
‘Was that a step up from the chanting and swaying?’  
No reply.  
‘Did you really need to do that?’  
‘Did I really need to whore myself out, you mean?’ Griffith snaps.  
Gatts meets his eyes steadily. ‘You said it, not me.’  
‘We need her, Gatts. Don’t presume to judge me without knowing what I’m about. I’m too close to let anything stop me now.’  
‘Be careful, Griffith. That’s all I’m saying.’  
‘Honestly, Gatts, you’re such a storm crow these days!’ Griffith says, exasperated. ‘Beware…beware…beware,’ he croaks in low, mock-mournful tones, moving behind Gatts and pushing him off the bed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Interlude**

I spin in the void, curled up with my head to my knees. Nothingness cradles my body in comforting darkness. I know that it will not last. One breath, another…  
Bright light flares, a red glow on the inside of my eyelids. I don’t want to open my eyes, but my wishes never affect the Dream. It has at least the virtue of being familiar. Other dreams are unknown quantities, but this Dream never changes. It is a constant I could do without, even though I forget now how long it has been with me.   
I lose the battle to remain wilfully blind as my eyes snap open and I hang suspended over the field of blood again. The faces appear, great red pustules erupting from the ground, and moaning fills the air. I don’t need to look up. If I did I would see the sky filled with unnatural clouds whirling black and red. I have seen this so many times that it is almost as if I am coming home. My eyes search the familiar landscape for changes, but there are none. The victims aren’t here yet. They will come soon, they always do. If I listen carefully, I can almost make out what the faces are saying.   
They are here now, although they can’t see me; I don’t know why. Sometimes I try to warn them, but they never hear me. Again the familiar scenes play out: the giant hand rising up, the beasts, the deaths and the flying man. As each man is slaughtered, his features fade from my mind. This is perhaps the biggest joke of all: that I would not recognise these faces I have lived with for so long if I saw them on the street.   
It is almost finished now and my part begins. The flying beast looks at me and beckons. I fall down towards him and his hands are on me, burning my skin. Dark lips curve in a closed-mouth smile under the mask and his fingers travel to my throat. Strangulation again? No, his hands are holding a knife. Vivisection? My least favourite option. Perhaps he will be kind and slit my throat instead.   
He kisses me and my mouth is on fire. Poison. It doesn’t take long, but I think my choking and thrashing is amusing enough to make up for the brevity of this death. My vision blurs and fades as I try to force out the question that always remains unasked: Who are you?

* * *

 **Chapter Five**

 _Itsutsu, Ikusa no chi no ame no_  
(Five, the rain of blood because of war)

The Hawks’ victory at the Korai throws the Chudan Empire into turmoil. Engaged as the Chudan nobles are in their power struggles, incursions into Midland cease almost completely. Consequently, the Band of the Hawk has little to do for the time being.   
Weeks pass in Garima and Gatts feels more out of step with the other Hawks every day. They are all benefiting from Griffith’s knighthood, both in terms of prestige and money. These days, in any tavern in the city, you have only to mention you are a Hawk to bring bar girls flocking around and get your cup refilled for free. Corkus has taken to wearing silk shirts every day. Gatts can’t understand his own restlessness, dogged as he is by an inexplicable dissatisfaction. He doesn’t think he’s sulking, although Griffith has hardly had time for the Hawks since his return, busy as he is attending court functions and building relationships with various people. That is understandable, even laudable. There is a direct correlation at this level between political connections and success and Gatts will back Griffith in his aims every step of the way.  
He goes along with Griffith to some of his meetings, standing silently in the background as Griffith talks with this or that noble, sliding easily through conversations where every remark contains multiple levels of meaning. More and more often, Griffith is summoned to the royal presence. Gatts can’t understand why the King, so seemingly benevolent, should make him uneasy. His audiences never have the razor-edge of others that Gatts has been to, where one slip of the tongue could lead to disaster. All too often, the ruler of Midland rambles on, talking vaguely about the customs of a distant province of Midland, say, or his visits to the temple of Void.   
Perhaps, Gatts thinks, it is the King’s devotion to the God Hand’s principal deity that worries him so? That devotion slowly begins to push Griffith to increase his involvement with the temples of Void and Slan. His friend’s new preoccupation with religion worries Gatts, especially when Griffith begins making large donations not only to the two major temples, but also to those of Ubik and Conrad. Gatts consoles himself with the thought that it is a calculated gambit of Griffith’s, but his friend’s cheerfully cynical attitude towards the God Hand has given way to something far more inscrutable. Gatts knows only too well how good Griffith is at masking his true feelings, and yet –  
Then again, when has Griffith ever done anything other than what he wanted to do? Gatts can do nothing but watch as Griffith begins spending more and more time with Priestess Iruva and her fellow priests, often returning to his quarters late at night or not at all. Even worse, many Hawk soldiers are beginning to follow his example, visiting the temples to pray on a regular basis, as well as to partake of the backroom pleasures they offer.  
Gatts begins to grow used to waking in the night when Griffith returns. He cracks an eye open on one of those nights, watching Griffith sit heavily on the bed and scrub his hands over his face. Gatts knows he has come from one of the temples – the smell of incense hangs heavy around him. It is hard to tell in the shadows of the room, but he seems dazed for a few moments, not quite sure of where he is. He reaches for his pendant, holding it tightly, rubbing it with the tips of his fingers, as if for reassurance. Then he sighs and reaches down to pull his boots off.  
Gatts rises on his elbow. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks.  
‘Just tired, I think. Masses at the temples always seem to go on forever, don’t they?’  
‘Then why do you go to them?’  
Griffith looks irritable. ‘Why _do_ you affect this faux-naïf pose? You know perfectly well why I need to go to them.’  
‘You’re never yourself when you come back.’  
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy, Gatts,’ Griffith says, standing to begin undressing. ‘Tonight I felt like I was never going to get out of that place, like I was trapped in there forever. Stupid, really.’  
‘Don’t go, Griffith. It’s not worth it.’  
‘Yes, it is. It has to be.’  
>

One day Gatts receives an unexpected visitor. In the late afternoon, the time when most of Garima sleeps, a tentative knock sounds at his door. He opens the door to a slight cloaked figure, which pushes back its hood to reveal the tattooed forehead of a God Hand novice.  
‘Lida,’ Gatts blurts, surprised. The girl smiles broadly and he lets her into the room.  
‘You look well,’ she says. ‘Heroism appears to suit you.’ Although she sounds happy to see him, her eyes are darting around the room.  
‘He’s not here?’ she continues, sounding disappointed.  
‘Griffith? No, I think he’ll be gone till late tonight,’ Gatts tells her and her face falls. She sits on Griffith’s bed, looking rather small in her black novice’s robe.  
‘He never comes to see me anymore,’ she says.  
Gatts shrugs, seating himself on his own bed. ‘He’s very busy these days,’ he says, the words sounding foolish even as he says them.  
Lida looks at him ironically. ‘Busy fucking my head priestess, you mean?’  
‘Is he?’ Gatts says, trying his best to sound surprised.  
‘What, as if you didn’t know? Don’t think I’m jealous, I’ve always known that he doesn’t like women, but I thought we were at least friends.’  
She shrugs, and goes on in a harder tone, ‘Though I’m not sure that he hasn’t changed his preferences. I mean, why is he always with _her_ nowadays? She’ll bed him and leave him dry once she’s done.’  
Gatts looks at her quizzically. ‘Why did you join the temple, Lida? You don’t sound very devout.’   
She snorts. ‘ _Join_ the temple? I was given to the temple because my parents couldn’t afford to feed me. Much like Griffith, except that his owner was more direct about what he wanted him for. And, of course,’ she goes on in a high-pitched tone, clearly mimicking someone, ‘I’m so much luckier than all those urchins on the street, with a home and the ability to devote my life to the Goddess, as the novice mistress says. Lucky!’ She sounds ready to either laugh or cry.  
‘Why don’t you leave?’ Gatts asks her.  
She goes still and Gatts is aware that they are both treading on thin ice. Finally, she says, ‘You can’t, after a point.’  
‘Why not?’   
‘You just …you can’t leave the place. You hate it and you need it and you can’t ever leave!’ Her hands are working furiously on her lap, pulling at each other till Gatts is afraid her fingers will snap.  
In the distance, temple bells ring and Lida’s head snaps up, a strange look of hunger written over it.  
She pulls her hood back over her head and rises to leave. At the door, she turns to Gatts. ‘If you can do something to stop Griffith from seeing that woman, do it. She’s dangerous.’ She smiles briefly, bitterly. ‘So am I, I suppose, but I do care for him…a little.’  
Gatts watches her go, surprised when she turns and kisses him on the cheek. ‘Take care of yourself, Gatts,’ she says and he recognises it as a final goodbye.  
>

Lida’s visit fuels his growing disquiet about Priestess Iruva. ‘Griffith?’ he says one day, during one of the increasingly infrequent afternoons the two spend going over issues relating to the Hawks. These days, Gatts doesn’t even see him at night: Griffith has moved into quarters more suitable for the leader of the Hawks.  
‘Mmm?’ Griffith replies absently, poring over a requisition for uniforms.  
‘I really wish you would stop seeing the Priestess,’ he says.  
An expressive twist of Griffith’s eyebrows lets Gatts know the suggestion is not appreciated, but he blunders on regardless.  
‘She’s…I think she’s dangerous,’ he says.  
‘To whom?’  
‘Look, I just don’t think you should spend this much time with her. There are a lot of strange rumours about her.’  
There is a veiled contempt in Griffith’s eyes; Gatts is not sure for whom. ‘We understand each other well enough,’ Griffith says, his lips twisting into a strange smile. ‘Don’t interfere in something you don’t understand.’ He bends his head to the requisitions again and Gatts knows it is the end of the conversation. They spend the rest of the afternoon in silence, one hurt and the other inscrutable. Gatts doesn’t raise the subject again after that.  
>

In Griffith’s absence, Gatts begins spending more of his time with Pippin, Casca and Judeau. Corkus spends most of his time carousing in taverns these days, so he is rarely to be found in the barracks. Rickert, more worryingly, has shown an increasingly religious bent of mind lately and is a regular visitor to the Black Temple. So far, the other officers’ insistence that it is only an adolescent phase has stopped Gatts from having a serious talk with him, but he begins to keep a closer eye on the young Hawk.  
The enforced idleness has only one advantage that Gatts can see. Simultaneously worried and bored stupid, he whiles away the hours in Judeau’s company and begins to learn more about court politics, a subject on which Judeau is frighteningly well informed. Apparently, he grew up within the servants’ quarters of the palaces, the illegitimate child of a palace maid, so sorting true rumour from false within the vast maze of palace gossip has become almost second nature for him.  
Gatts slowly understands why Griffith is worrying Prince Yurius so. The prince, little else though Gatts can find to say in his favour, has proved to be farsighted in his dislike of Griffith. It is an open secret that he hopes to marry his son to Princess Charlotte as soon as young Adonis comes of age; Griffith’s sudden rise to popularity, coupled with the favour that the King shows him, are threatening to throw Yurius’ plans into disarray. Judeau has been keeping very careful tabs on the prince’s activities this past while.  
Evidently not without reason, as Gatts learns one evening. Returning to his quarters after conducting an unsuccessful search for Casca, he finds Griffith sitting in his chair, buried in a book. ‘Hey,’ Gatts says and is rewarded by Griffith’s smile.   
‘Hello, Gatts. Here, take a look at this.’ Griffith raises his free hand to Gatts, and Gatts squints at the object in Griffith’s hand. Unmoving, the body of a tiny scorpion rests inside a wooden box.  
‘Where did you get this?’  
‘I found this little present in my bed. And, yes, if I hadn’t been forewarned, I would be quite dead right now.’  
Gatts raises his eyes from the tiny corpse to Griffith’s eyes. ‘Who’s behind it?’  
‘Prince Yurius. The man is becoming quite insupportable. Which is why I have come to ask a favour from you.’  
Gatts spreads his palms outwards in a gesture that promises anything.   
‘I want him dead, Gatts. Tonight. Can you do it?’  
He should have been prepared for the request, but somehow, it still catches him by surprise. Assasination. It is not really so great a thing, given the number of men he has already killed. Yes, but that was on the battlefield, in open combat, a small voice in his mind says. He ignores it. Yurius is too much of a threat to Griffith to be ignored.   
‘I’ll do it.’   
>

Five hours later, he is perched outside Prince Yurius’s study window, his features masked by a black cloth tied over his nose and mouth and his head covered by the hood of his cloak. Any moment now…  
The prince’s manservant receives his orders for the day and leaves the room. Gatts grips his sword tightly and springs over the sill. Yurius is standing at the fire with his back to the window. Some sixth sense tells him that he is not alone and he turns to see Gatts. But it is much too late and the next instant Gatts’ sword has separated his head from his shoulders. Suddenly, the door creaks open. Gatts whips around and lunges forward, driving the unknown intruder back against the corridor wall with his sword. In the torchlight, he makes out the features of the young boy pinned on his sword. It is Prince Adonis.  
Horrified, he stares at the foot or more of steel buried in the boy’s chest. Adonis himself seems more surprised than frightened. Slumping against the wall and sliding down, he reaches out a hand to Gatts. That gesture, more than anything else, shakes Gatts to his core. ‘Why…?’ Adonis says, but the rest of the question goes unasked, as streams of red flow out of his mouth and his head lolls to one side, the blue eyes still round and questioning.  
Shaking, Gatts becomes aware of voices in the stairwell. He has to get out of here. Running back into the study, he vaults over the windowsill and up onto the roof. From there, he retraces his route down the wall of the compound. Drawing his hood down over his face, he disappears into the crowd, even as torches are lit behind him and Yurius’s men begin searching for the assassin.  
Reaching the Drunken Goat, he staggers in, unaware that his hands are still shaking. ‘Where’s Griffith?’ he asks Corkus hoarsely. Corkus shrugs, more occupied with his hand of cards. Casca appears at his shoulder, irate, demanding why he had missed their practice session. Griffith, she tells him, is at the Temple of Void. He stumbles out of the tavern, hardly aware that she is following him. He can’t go to the Temple. Instead, he will go…he will go…He closes his eyes in weariness, wanting to slump against the wall and stay there.  
At his side, Casca has fallen silent. She hails a passing rickshaw and bundles him into it. Once they arrive at the barracks, she takes Gatts to his quarters and tends his wound, tearing cotton strips to bind the bleeding gash on his leg where he scraped it in his haste to escape. Gatts, barely conscious at this point, is only grateful that he doesn’t have to do anything else. She makes him lie down on the bed, blows out the candle and watches as he falls into a restless sleep almost instantly. Her face is worried, as she closes the door behind her softly.  
>

Gatts wakes disoriented the next day, confused for a few moments. Slowly, the events of the night before come back to him and he covers his face with his hands. Why? Adonis’s young voice echoes inside his head. He wants to go back to sleep and never wake up. He has killed a child for no reason, a senseless, careless, stupid mistake that can never be corrected. He gets out of bed and walks to Griffith’s quarters.  
Inside, Griffith is breakfasting at the window, a cup raised to his lips. His eyes are clear as he smiles at Gatts. ‘Good work,’ he says, ‘very efficient. And you got rid of the son as well, though that wasn’t strictly necessary.’  
‘I didn’t mean to!’ Gatts says, in an instinctive cry of protest, and then bites his lip. Griffith, watching him, says. ‘What’s wrong, Gatts?’  
‘It was a mistake,’ Gatts says, miserably. ‘I saw someone coming though the door and I just ran my sword through him. Without even thinking to see who it was.’  
‘Oh,’ Griffith says and, for one crazy moment, Gatts thinks he looks disappointed. Griffith stands and puts his hand on Gatts’ shoulder. ‘It’s okay.’  
‘No! It’s not! We’ve killed a lot of people, Griffith, but not children. Never children.’  
‘Oh, we’ve killed children, Gatts. Perhaps not ourselves, but do you think we can disown responsibility for all the boys who’ve followed the band and run into battle with us?’  
‘It’s not the same,’ Gatts said, stunned.   
‘It’s exactly the same, Gatts. There is no way to justify it, but to accomplish what I set out to do.’  
Gatts has never heard Griffith sound so cold. They hold each other’s eyes for long moments, until Gatts turns his head. Then he walks back to his room, buries his head in his arms and weeps.


	6. Chapter 6

_Muttsu, Mukuro to kawarya senu_  
(Six, just like a dead body)

The morning after Yurius’s assassination marks a turning point for Gatts. For the first time, his faith in Griffith has been shaken. He feels numb.   
By contrast, the whole of the city is aflame with rumour and counter-rumour, trying to understand who could have killed such a powerful figure. Griffith, naturally, comes under suspicion, but Iruva provides an alibi for the night of the murder that the court is forced to accept. Almost immediately, they come to realise that Yurius’s death has made Griffith even more influential at court than before. More and more nobles flock to seek the White Hawk’s favour.  
Gatts knows that the others are worried about him. Casca is particularly solicitous, albeit in her usual abrupt manner, but Gatts avoids her most of all. He knows that she suspects the truth and he doesn’t want to see the questions in her eyes. Eventually, Griffith chooses to notice his distraction and asks him if he would like to lead a recruiting mission to Siova. Gatts is only too happy to accept.  
Riding down into the fertile plains of his home province, Gatts and his band of men stop at every large village on the way. At each stop, they stay for a day or two, drilling on the meeting ground of the village and signing up some of the young men who acquit themselves creditably against a Hawk in a practice bout. Their fame has spread to such an extent that they have to turn away many of the men who want to join them.  
Gatts does not make a conscious note of it, but he is aware of the exact date on which they are to reach his own village. He knows that many of the men look forward to seeing the ocean for the first time in their lives: the part of Midland that borders the ocean has always been peaceful and prosperous, so the Hawks have never had occasion to come here. As they near the ocean, a knot of mixed feelings grows in his stomach: distaste and eagerness. There is no one in the village that he looks forward to seeing, but he is human enough to want to rub his success in each and every one of their faces.   
Their entrance, when it finally comes, is curiously anticlimactic. They ride in one evening and make straight for the village’s only inn, a decrepit old building near the main road. That night, after the Hawks have made themselves comfortable in their quarters, Gatts ventures out on once-familiar streets, now strangely changed to him. The white dust coating the road rises in small puffs with his steps, as he walks past the village temple and the weaver’s shop. Soon enough he sees the forge. It is lit by the red glow of the furnace, just as he remembers. He walks past; it is not what he is interested in. Further on, past the neatly thatched houses of the village people, is an old shack.  
He ducks inside to find the village midwife squatting on her haunches, devouring her evening meal of rice and fish. ‘Good even, grandmother,’ he says, while the crone squints up at his face. ‘Do you remember me?’  
‘Sit down, so I can see your face in the light,’ she says, gesturing at a spot in front of the sputtering fire. He squats beside her and she studies his features intently, a look of triumph coming over her face.  
‘Ha! I knew it! You’re back, like a bad penny,’ she says. ‘Did you come back to finish the job, then?’  
‘What?’  
‘Well, your stepfather’s dead, which only leaves three of them to go,’ she says, smiling nastily.   
He hadn’t known he had become a killer so early. He ignores the question with some effort, knowing from painful experience that she enjoys provoking everyone she meets. ‘I came to ask about my mother. You delivered me, didn’t you? No one ever told me anything about her.’  
‘That’s because there’s precious little to tell, boy. Your mother only stayed in the village five days, when she was on the run with her group of deserters. Soon enough, the King’s men caught up with them and hung her, pregnant as she was. I was walking by the tree with your foster mother when we saw you slip from her and onto the ground. I didn’t have to do a thing. She was already dead when you were born.’  
He nods. It only confirms what he was able to piece together from the jeers of the villagers.  
‘I told your foster mother to leave you be. I told her a dead whore’s child had no business living, but she was too soft hearted to leave you crying there. Well, she soon regretted it, didn’t she?’  
This brings his head up and he glares at her. ‘You wanted to leave a child to die? What kind of healer are you?’  
‘I make no apologies, boy,’ the old hag tells him. ‘There’s things as should and shouldn’t be saved. You were meant to die on the day you were born. Your life will only bring suffering to us all.’  
He stands up, too angry to listen anymore. ‘Shut up, you old bitch! What do you know about it?’ He pushes his face close to hers. ‘Look at me now, you senile fool! I’m fine, I’m better than anyone in this damned village will ever be!’   
He leaves the hut, his whole body shaking with anger. Fool, he tells himself, fool! Why did you ever come back? He spends the next day barking orders at his men, his displeasure so plain on his face that no one ventures a joke or a familiar remark. Days later, as they are riding on to the next town, stupidly, irrationally, the midwife’s words ring in his mind again and again. _Your life will only bring suffering to us all._   
Even the countryside seems to reflect his mood: the summer has been unusually dry and the fields are sere and parched. People begin looking wary instead of impressed when they ride in, unwilling to part with any portion of their stores when this year’s harvest looks to be so scanty. The farmers are increasingly worried about the tardy monsoon.  
It is in character for Garima, Gatts thinks sourly, that the capital seems so completely removed from the atmosphere of worry prevalent in the rest of Midland. His month-long absence has only reinforced his dislike of the place. The stone arches of the south gate are decorated with garlands of flowers and his horse tramples more flowers as he makes his way back to the barracks. The three-day celebration of some wealthy guildsman’s daughter’s wedding has just ended and Garima is still recovering from its excesses. As are the Hawks, Gatts discovers to his disgust, when he walks through the barracks. The quarters of most of the men are a far cry from the Spartan cleanliness he expects from them. Griffith will have to be told about it: his increasing lack of involvement with the men is having an impact on morale.  
He dumps his saddlebags in his rooms and pauses only to wash his face and hands before he walks to Griffith’s quarters. When his knock goes unanswered, he pushes the door slightly ajar and a waft of scented smoke washes over his face: Dreamseeker. Gatts’ face tightens and he moves into the room, following the smell of the drug. He finds Griffith lying on his bed, toying with the carved pipe he is smoking. Griffith’s eyes are half-closed and his fingers move in a languid wave when he sees Gatts.  
‘What are you doing, Griffith?’ Gatts snatches the pipe away from his friend, who protests, but is too far-gone to exert himself in recovering it. He gives up, smiling lazily at Gatts.  
‘Aaah, so you’re back. I missed you, you know. I met the King and Iruva and Dhoval and a dozen other nobles and priests, and then I met them all again, but I still missed you.’  
He continues in a dreamy tone, ‘I never worked half so hard with Gennon, you know. I go to the temples every day – they’re so powerful, Gatts, you can’t imagine, I never even guessed – and the things they make me do!’ A quiver goes through his body. ‘But it’s all worth it, isn’t it, if it’s for my dream? It’s okay if that’s why I’m doing it, isn’t it, Gatts?’  
Under the drug-induced lethargy, there is a note of what seems to be anxiety in his voice, to which Gatts can’t help but respond. ‘Yes, Griffith.’  
A beatific smile greets his response, then Griffith’s lids slide fully shut and he falls asleep. Gatts opens the windows to air out the room. Then he goes through Griffith’s possessions. At the end of the search, there is a neat pile of vials and powders in front of him. Gatts hadn’t thought it was possible to feel worse than he had when he left his village for the second time. Everything the Band of the Hawk stands for seems to be falling apart.  
>

His confrontation with the other officers is even more depressing. Corkus and Rickert are at the Temple of Desire, but the remaining three are frustrated and edgy. Not bothering with pleasantries, Gatts asks them about the state of the barracks. They tell him that the men are getting increasingly out of control, that more and more of them are following Corkus and Rickert’s example, and that there are too many of them to reprimand. Griffith could help, if he exerted himself, but the men are only too aware that their leader is indulging in vices of his own.  
‘And what are the rest of you doing, to stop Griffith from smoking himself stupid? Why is he in this state? What would happen if the King saw him like this?’ he demands angrily.  
‘The King is an addict himself, Gatts,’ Casca replies tightly. ‘We’ve all tried to talk to Griffith, but he’s spending more and more time in the temples and at the palace and none of us can get through to him!’ Her dark eyes are desperate when she looks at him. ‘We were hoping that when you came back – ’ she breaks off.  
Gatts closes his eyes.   
‘Something’s wrong with him. I mean, besides the drugs,’ Judeau says, ‘I’d never even seen Griffith drunk before this and now you can barely find him without a pipe in his hand.’  
‘It’s those damned priests! They have the whole city wrapped around their fingers! My men have started visiting those damned temples and I can’t stop them. Even Rickert won’t listen to me.’ Pippin’s voice breaks and they fall silent. All of them know how close the giant is to their youngest member. If they are now so far apart, then things have gone very badly wrong.  
>

The following days are little better. Gatts berates his men, individually and in groups, making it very clear that none of them are indispensable. It snaps most of them out of their insubordination, but some remain recalcitrant, forcing him to discharge them. Even those who submit have a disturbingly resentful light in their eyes, but Gatts tells himself that it is a start. Rickert and Corkus tell him flatly that their religious practices are none of his business, but at least his tongue-lashing shames them into paying closer attention to their men.   
Attempts to reason with Griffith get him nowhere. Gatts knows that his friend does not possess the weakness of the true addict; he’s convinced Griffith is using Dreamseeker to hide from something, but he can’t get anything out of him. The closer they come to the new moon, the more nervous Griffith seems to become, avoiding Gatts and his questions in increasingly ingenious ways.  
Rickert finally unbends enough to tell Gatts that the new moon of the ninth month marks one of the most auspicious days for followers of the God Hand and that some sort of temple ceremony will be taking place on that day. Only true devotees are allowed to witness it, he says. In a sudden rush of sincerity, he puts his hand on Gatts’ arm, telling him that it is not too late for him to see the error of his ways, that he really wants Gatts to experience what he’s learnt. Shortly, however, this glimpse of the old caring Rickert is subsumed under the persona of the rigid fanatic.  
Casca, Judeau and Pippin are also grimly combating the insubordination in their ranks. Increasingly, the four of them feel as though they are under siege from an intangible enemy, sensing a disturbing miasma of religious fanaticism throughout the barracks. It has gone far beyond the professional soldier’s normal superstition. Most of the men have taken to wearing armbands that denote their religious affiliation, some of them going so far as to conduct private services within their quarters.  
Gatts feels at sea among his men. He had always taken it for granted that they shared his indifference towards the God Hand and all other forms of organised religion, assuming naively that a shared language of army slang and smutty jokes was evidence of their common thinking, of a certain irreverence towards any and all institutions. And now so many of his Hawks, friends and comrades all, have swallowed this putrid religious doctrine whole, ignoring or unaware of its overtones of corruption and excess. It is as if he is suddenly living amongst strangers.  
Judeau seems to be suffering most from the strain. One night, Gatts passes his room and hears him cry out. Inside, Judeau is sweating and shaking in his bed. He tells Gatts that he has been having terrible nightmares. ‘Since when?’ Gatts asks him, and Judeau tells him that he doesn’t know; he’s had them as long as he can remember, but they’ve been so much worse lately.   
With a start, Gatts notices the circles under Judeau’s eyes: insomnia has been taking its toll on Judeau and his usually calm demeanour is fraying at the edges. Gatts has been having bad dreams himself – involving some kind of flying monster? – that he never quite remembers when he wakes, but he remembers his fear clearly and understands something of what Judeau is going through.  
Judeau is clearly in no state to be left alone, so Gatts sits on the edge of the bed and talks about nothing for a while. It seems to help and after that night they often meet on the roof when unable to sleep, taking grim comfort in each other’s company.  
Gatts begins keeping tabs on Griffith’s movements, as far as he is able, which is not saying much since Griffith spends an increasing amount of time sequestered with the King or the priests. He disappears on the night of the new moon without telling Gatts, who settles down to wait for him in his room. Several hours later, he is awoken by the sound of footsteps. The lamps have burned out and the room is dark when Griffith walks through the door, more alert than Gatts has seen him for some time, and strangely excited. ‘Where were you, Griffith?’ he asks, prepared to weather a storm of insults. He has heard them all before: he is not Griffith’s keeper, Griffith can do what he likes, and to hell with Gatts!   
To his surprise, Griffith answers him calmly. ‘The Temple of Desire.’  
‘What, smoking up again?’ Gatts asks, irritated, in a deliberate attempt to provoke him.  
Griffith smiles. ‘No, I don’t need that rubbish anymore.’ He walks to the window, fingering the red pendant around his neck as he looks out at the palace. Then he swings around to face Gatts, standing silhouetted against the black sky.  
‘I’m sorry. I’ve been worrying you, haven’t I? It’s stupid when I think about it now. I don’t know why I’ve been acting this way.’  
Gatts is silent, confused by Griffith’s sudden remorse.  
‘There’s no point in having a goal if you’re not prepared to sacrifice everything to it, is there, Gatts?’  
‘No,’ Gatts says slowly.   
‘Poor Gatts,’ Griffith continues, almost affectionately, ‘always so worried. There’s really no need to be, you know. Things are going to go exactly as planned.’  
‘Oh, good,’ Gatts says dryly. ‘Do your plans involve you taking any kind of interest in the Hawks in the near future?’  
Griffith laughs. ‘Go to sleep, Gatts. Tomorrow is going to be very busy.’ Gatts leaves, puzzled, but hopeful for the first time in weeks.  
>

Gatts wakes to a hand urgently shaking his shoulder in the early morning. ‘Sir Griffith is asking for you,’ a page tells him, eyes wide. Dressing quickly, he bumps into Casca and Pippin in the corridor leading to Griffith’s quarters. ‘What’s going on?’ he asks them, but they don’t know either. They reach the scene of madness that Griffith’s rooms have become, pages hurrying in and out as fast as they can walk. Inside, Griffith is tying his cravat, looking into the mirror held by one of the boys. ‘We’re going to the palace,’ he says, ‘the King will be making a special announcement to the city today.’   
‘About what?’ Casca says.  
‘You’ll see. Get ready, quickly.’  
An hour later, the Hawk officers are assembled behind Griffith as he greets the King. Griffith bows low and the King nods, smiling, and passes on to the balcony used for royal announcements to the city. The square overlooked by the palace is packed with a solid mass of bodies, their upturned faces expectant. Cheering breaks out when the King lifts his arms outwards and up, greeting his subjects.  
‘Today is a day of rejoicing for Midland, my people. I have given Princess Charlotte’s hand in marriage to a man who has proved his valour time and time again on the battlefield. I have no doubt that their union will ensure many years of prosperity and happiness for the people of Midland.’  
He turns to the side, stretching his hand out to Griffith, who walks out into view of the crowd.  
‘I give you – Sir Griffith!’  
This time the cheers are frenzied, shaking the foundations of the palace in an outpouring of exultation that reaches to the skies. Griffith stands by the King’s side, a proud straight figure, raising elegant hands to acknowledge the approval of the people.


	7. Chapter 7

_Nanatsu, Namida mo kare hate te_  
(Seven, my tears run out)

Gatts props his hip against a wall, finally alone with Griffith after the shock of the morning’s announcement. ‘You couldn’t possibly have warned me about this last night?’ he asks.   
Griffith is unrepentant. ‘What would have been the fun in that?’ he replies, smiling maddeningly at Gatts. ‘You should have seen your face.’  
‘I suppose this means we won’t be leaving the city anytime soon?’  
‘You suppose right. I could hardly miss the celebrations for my own wedding, now could I?’ The King had announced that a whole month of feasts and merrymaking would lead up to the wedding itself, when he would formally proclaim Griffith his heir. Gatts privately thinks that feasts and fireworks are the last thing needed when most of Midland is facing a drought, but he has the sense to keep silent on the subject.  
The celebrations begin the next day, with public feasts each day in every square of Garima, and silver coins being thrown to eager crowds. News of the wedding has resulted in a festival atmosphere, leaving people giddy with anticipation for the next parade or play or fireworks display. Men and women dance in streets strung with flower garlands at all hours of the day, disregarding the blazing sun overhead, and continue on into the night. The feverish preparations for the wedding are enough to distract attention from the decreasing supply of foodstuffs into the capital and the diminishing reserves of water, but Gatts wonders how long it will last.  
>

The answer comes only too soon. The monsoon has passed Midland by and reports of drought and famine in remote parts of the kingdom begin trickling in. Even the Durai delta regions, the fertile heart of agriculture in Midland, are parched and unable to send their tithe to the King this year. The farmers’ green fields of wheat and rice have withered and died in the heat and they are forced to fall back on the previous year’s reserves. The King, eager to celebrate his daughter’s wedding in the most ostentatious manner possible, has ignored the warnings of his advisors to moderate expenses. Gambling as he has been on a prosperous year to ensure the health of the royal treasury, the sudden poverty of the farmlands comes as a serious blow.  
Even the city, normally cushioned from the vagaries of nature, is beginning to feel the effects of the drought. The price of bread goes up, as does the price of rice. Matters are made worse by the Midlanders flooding into the city from ravaged areas, until finally the guards are told to turn away all refugees. Every back alley seems filled with emaciated humanity, their faces gaunt and hungry, their hands perpetually outstretched. Gatts grows used to the sight of royal soldiers dragging corpses away every morning when he makes his rounds. Only the cremation grounds are prospering; smoke rises high into the sweltering air from the fires, fed by the dead wood all around the city.  
Whispers begin circulating: that the royal coffers are almost empty, that the extravagant celebrations have drained the exchequer too far for food to be supplied to starving Midlanders. But the wedding celebrations continue and, in a masterpiece of insensitivity, the King appears with Griffith to announce that taxes on the citizens of Garima will be doubled to compensate for the dearth of income from the rural areas. The same evening, Gatts goes to the Temple of Desire to make his daily report to Griffith and finds him sublimely indifferent to the political consequences of the taxes.  
‘Certainly, they have to pinch and squeeze a bit this year, Gatts, but what of it? It is their duty as King’s citizens.’  
Gatts is appalled. Griffith has always been arrogant, but never to the extent of delusion. Never at the expense of other people. ‘Griffith, you know as well as I do that this year most of them can’t afford to pay their taxes, let alone twice the usual amount. You can’t suddenly be so far removed from the rest of Midland, just because you’re engaged to the Princess!’  
Griffith shrugs bored shoulders. ‘A few of them will starve. It’s not so important, surely?’ His attention drifts to the revelry behind them. One woman, drunk and half-naked, pretends to flog her neighbour with a long string of pearls.   
‘Do you really want to become the heir at a time when your people are dying in the streets? Your popularity will not carry you safely through this, I warn you!’  
‘Very soon, the approval of the people will matter not at all, not to me and not to my allies. A few days, Gatts, we have only to wait a few days.’ The necklace breaks, to the shrieks of its owner and the cheers of the other guests, and hundreds of glistening pearls scatter across the floor.  
>

Even besieged by the twin fears of drought and famine, the city is willing to believe in their leaders. Cheers in the streets still greet Griffith, though they grow weaker by the day. Gatts thinks it would not take much for their faith to be restored in the King and his heir, just a little less pomp and a little more care for the people. No gestures are made, token or otherwise, and the temperature of the city begins to rise. Patrolling the streets in Hawk insignia, Gatts feels the skin on the back of his neck crawl. He recognises the smell of suppressed anger. It will take very little provocation for the city to explode.  
In the end, a mundane bread shortage begins the final collapse. One raised voice becomes a cacophony of protest, running through the city like fire, inciting panic and rage. Looters begin breaking into provision stores and wine shops, blocking the streets with barrels and broken glass. Even as the army is deployed to control it, rioting spreads rapidly, heading inevitably to the source of the city’s discontent.   
Gatts, caught unawares and on foot, is unable to get back in time to warn Griffith. He stands helplessly at the edge of the crowd in front of the palace. So recently filled with rejoicing faces, the square now swarms with gesticulating arms and voices raised in anger. They cry for bread, for rice, for water. For the royal family and the nobles to stop dining on peacock’s tongues cheek by jowl with people who haven’t eaten in a week. Come out, they say to the King, come out!  
But it is Griffith who comes out of the palace gates, riding on his white stallion, his face calm and unafraid. Hawks follow him out of the gates, lining up outside the walls of the palace. The clamour dies down, as the protestors strain to hear the White Hawk, their great war hero.  
‘People of Garima, go home. I understand that you are afraid, but there is no need to be. The situation is under control. You must trust in your leaders to judge what is best for the city.’  
Where are the promises of free food and water, the expressions of concern? Gatts can hear the thoughts of the crowd as clearly as if they are written above their heads. He waits with bated breath for Griffith to make some kind of concession, only to see him turn his horse toward the gates of the palace.  
With a roar, the infuriated crowd surges forward. A raised hand flings something at Griffith, hitting him on the cheek and stopping him in his tracks. ‘Whore!’ another voice yells, as the mob shouts its approval of the action. Griffith wipes the dirt off his cheek with slow fingers. Gatts tenses: there is something terrible about Griffith’s face. He gestures with one hand and Gatts, unbelieving, watches as the Hawks, his Hawks, draw their bows and shoot repeatedly into the unarmed crowd. In what seems like moments, more than a hundred bodies lie dead in the square and the rest of the protestors flee, shrieking with fear and outrage.  
>

Waiting to see Griffith that afternoon, Gatts is not sure what to say. Months ago, he would not have had to say anything, for Griffith had always known what he felt. Now, though, there is very little of the old Griffith that remains and Gatts doesn’t think he wants to wait while it disappears completely. He says it as quickly as possible, wanting only to get the whole thing over with.  
‘I’m leaving, Griffith. I’ve already told the others.’  
Griffith looks at him as though he has lost his mind. ‘Why? Not because of this morning?’ His reaction is so calm that it seems unreal, disjoint from anything a human being would display.  
‘Yes,’ Gatts says, desperate to leave.  
Griffith laughs incredulously. ‘You can’t be shaken by a few ruffians rioting in the streets, Gatts!’  
‘Griffith! Do you understand what you’ve done? This isn’t collateral damage on the battlefield - this is butchery, pure and simple!’ Desperate to get through to him, Gatts grabs his shoulders and shakes him, only to have his hands removed with a strength his friend had not previously possessed.  
Griffith looks at him coldly. ‘You will never touch me without my permission again. I took what action was necessary to control the situation and I do not expect to be questioned by my subordinates.’  
There is nothing in Griffith’s eyes of the friend Gatts remembers. ‘I’m leaving, Griffith. I can’t take this anymore. Find someone else to do your dirty work for you.’  
Griffith looks at him, seemingly bored. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, Gatts. Much as I would have preferred you to stay with me for _loyalty_ and _friendship_ ,’ his voice flicks the words at him like blades, ‘I am quite prepared to use force to detain you.’  
Gatts turns to leave, only to find Griffith’s personal guards facing him, their swords bared. He half-turns and something slams into his head. Falling to the floor, he hears a voice telling them to take him away, then nothing more.  
>  
Gatts wakes to hear voices raised in anger. They all seem rather far away. This is, he realises, as the sleep clears from his head, because he is in some sort of cell, in a line with other identical cells, and the yelling is coming from outside the entire block.  
‘What do you mean you can’t let us in? Do you know who we are?’ That’s Casca, he thinks, with a warm rush of relief. Good old Casca, come to save the day!  
Pippin’s low rumble sounds next, though Gatts can’t make out what he is saying. He can’t hear the guards’ replies either, but he is certain his friends will get him out.   
The arguing continues, at varying volumes, and, incredulously, he realises that the guards are winning. ‘But Griffith can’t possibly have said that,’ Casca says, sounding lost under her bluster. Eventually, they leave and Gatts is left staring at his hands, suddenly bereft.   
The days pass slowly after that. Each day, one or another of his Hawks comes to try and see him, retreating in defeat from Griffith’s absolute authority over the guards. Food and drink are sent in to him at regular intervals, but he can extract no news from the stony-faced guards. Nor are there any other prisoners in the cells in his block, deep in the lower levels of the Temple of Void. What can Griffith mean to do with him, if he no longer trusts him? Or is Gatts simply meant to rot in his cell forever, as a warning to the other Hawks?  
The thought sets him hunting furiously for a way to escape, scrabbling with his fingers at the walls in search of flaws and cracks, but the walls are unrelentingly smooth. He takes to watching the guards covertly, but knows he can’t overpower five of them at once in his unarmed state.   
There is a tiny window set high on one wall of Gatts’ cell, through which he can track the movement of the sun as it burns lower in the sky. And then the moon, round initially, but waning, its increasingly feeble light reminding Gatts each night of the coming new moon, when he will have no light at all. Irrationally, he fears that night, though he tells himself that it will be no different from any other.   
Every night, he wakes shaking at some point, sweating and dry-mouthed from dreams that he cannot remember. It seems to him that he has reached the end of a long parabola, where he is so far removed from his childhood existence, and yet equally wretched, equally disturbed. Soon, no doubt, he will be completely demented. His cracked laughter breaks the silence, and is absorbed by the black stone walls around him.  
>

Gatts takes to lying pressed against the wall with the window for most of the day. It allows the sun to fall on his chilled body and with his eyes closed he can hear the rhythms of life in the streets below. Even shut up in the Temple, he recognises the sounds of panic and rage, sounding increasingly frequently as the days pass. Sometimes, he sleeps, and his dreams slide back over him, enveloping him completely, though they vanish from memory by the time he wakes.  
‘Wake up, Gatts!’ He opens his eyes one day to find Judeau looking at him through the thick metal bars, frantic and running nervous hands through his blond hair.   
‘Judeau! Get me out of here!’ he says, more animated than he has been in days.   
‘I can’t, but I’ve come to help,’ Judeau says, displaying a metal file hidden between his fingers. ‘Listen, you have to listen to me, this is important.’  
Gatts raises a mental eyebrow. He has never seen the man in such a state. Though, of course, the current state of affairs would tend to alarm anyone. He wonders why he himself is so calm while Garima is rushing into anarchy outside his window and his best friend and leader falls headlong into insanity, but he’s too numb to pursue that train of thought for long.  
‘What?’  
Judeau is pacing in front of the cell as he talks: he can’t seem to keep still. ‘Ever since I was young, I’ve had flashes, visions you could call them, I guess, of things that would happen. Sometimes they happened exactly the way things happened in real life, sometimes a little different. I never knew if I could trust them to be accurate. Do you remember I told you my dreams have been really bad lately?’ He looks at Gatts and his eyes are frightened. ‘I think I’ve figured out what’s going on with Griffith and the priests.’  
‘So tell me!’  
‘I can’t explain it to you!’  
‘Why the hell not?’  
‘Because you have to stop them, and if I tell you what it’s about, you won’t be able to do it.’  
Gatts’ head begins to ache fiercely. Judeau, who has always been the Hawks’ voice of reason, is acting like a raving madman. It seems to be the order of the day.   
‘Will you help me?’ Gatts says, humouring him.  
‘It is for you alone to do.’ With sudden fierceness: ‘ Think, Gatts! _Think! Remember_. This…it has all happened before, many, many times!’  
‘What do you mean? Why can’t you just _tell_ me?’ Gatts snarls, equally frustrated and beginning to be frightened by Judeau’s intensity.  
‘I can’t! It has to come from within you.’  
‘Why won’t you help me?’  
Judeau looks sad, suddenly. ‘My presence would affect nothing. It never has. And, besides, there is someone I intend to take with me, this very day, out of this damned city.’ He looks at Gatts, silently asking for understanding. ‘I’m sorry, Gatts.’  
Gatts knows who Judeau wants to persuade to leave with him. With a sudden access of gentleness, he tells him: ‘She won’t go, Judeau. You know what Griffith means to her. Even in his current state.’  
Judeau’s lips twist. ‘Yes, I know exactly how she feels about him. But I have to try.’  
Gatts looks at him silently, and then nods, tacitly accepting his decision. He raises his open hand to the bars. Judeau lifts his own hand to press against his, passing him the file and clasping his fingers warmly around Gatts’ for a long moment. He walks back through the corridor, turning at the end to look at Gatts again. ‘Good luck, my friend.’  
‘Good luck, Judeau.’  
>

Gatts waits until the guards deliver his evening rations before he begins work on the bars. There is a reddish tinge to the metal as he begins sawing away at it, the bars and his hands lit by the setting sun. With sudden fear, he counts back the days to when he was captured and knows that tonight there will be no moon.  
Hours later, two of the prison bars are filed through. Gatts is working on the third, sweat dripping down his face and chest. He works blindly, his head and hands throbbing with pain. He has racked his brains for what seems like aeons, finally entering a trance-like state, where random scraps of memory drift across his mind. _Always keep your sword clean, my boy_ , Madik Roose tells him, while the midwife barks, _A dead whore’s child has no business living!_ Judeau sits next to him on the rooftop. _I’ve got a sure-fire way to make Casca go out with me_ , he says, and next to him, Rickert and Pippin are playing cards. _Cheater! You cheater, Pippin! You had the ace up your sleeve!_ Gennon flicks him a silver coin, _Thanks for taking care of my boy_ , while in front of him, Griffith…no, not Griffith, and not shorter than Gennon after all. But Gennon is gone. There is only the strange man now, as Gatts blinks his mind’s eye in confusion. Where are the rest?  
Another blink and he is standing on a red field of blood, as a massive hand erupts from the ground. Within it, he knows, is his best friend. He has to save him. Around him, his men are panicking, even as Casca tries to control them. The scene plays on and on in his mind, as a part of him watches silently. Finally, he remembers. He remembers everything.  
Waking with a jolt, his heart skips a beat to find his cell in complete darkness. _No! It can’t have started already!_ With the frenzy of the possessed, he rips the third bar out, squeezing himself out of his cell. In what feels like a single heartbeat, he has rushed out of the prisons to find the entire wing unguarded. He has stepped into a nightmare.  
Fire licks at the walls, flames eating away at the building, shadows and tongues of unnatural flame everywhere. _Where are they?_ He runs through abandoned corridors, deeper and deeper into the temple. There is a shudder as the foundations shake, then a keening wail. The walls melt and there are faces everywhere, moaning with wide-open mouths. Shrieked names, hysterical screams issue from Gatts’ open mouth: Pippin, Rickert, Casca, Griffith, Griffith, _Griffith_! He continues stumbling down empty hallways. No one here, no one _here_ , his mind screams. It needs blood, the ritual offerings, Griffith’s pendant. Where?   
Flash of memory – a cavernous underground chamber stretching on forever. He knows now. Lower, he needs to get lower. Sparks flying as he runs. His clothes are on fire and he slaps at them to beat out the flames. Down, quick, down the spiral staircase. Cooler here, the fire hasn’t reached here yet.  
Lower, lower, lower to a closed door reaching above Gatts’ head. He opens the door into a tunnel, heavy with the smell of incense. And something else? Drugs, a narcotic to soothe them. Walking faster, heels on stone floor: click, click, click. Stone gives way to dirt. The air’s heavier here. Chanting, low hum of voices. Tunnel turns right and then into the vast chamber he remembers from before.  
Instead of the hazy illumination he remembers, the cavern is lit by red light, emanating from an unknown source. Here, everywhere, are the Hawks, swaying, slack-jawed, their minds fogged and dazed, pupils dilated to black holes, mumbling their litany: _‘Welcome, fifth son, child of the God Hand, reborn in thine old image. The hour is at hand, make the sacrifice once more. Welcome, welcome, lord.’_  
Lithe inhuman forms twine around the soldiers; slender arms caress unseeing faces. The demons’ mouths, red and swollen, sound a low hum as they suck at the Hawks’ throats. Naked forms flit from Hawk to Hawk, like insects sampling the pollen of different flowers. One by one, men fall from their arms, drained and quiet, to be replaced by others. He pushes into the crowd and arms reach for him, eager to feed on him. One succubus pushes her way in front of him, beckoning with a delicate clawed hand. Impatient, he brushes off her insinuating fingers and moves past, only to stop when he hears a whispered ‘Gatts…’  
He looks back into a face now familiar to him. ‘Lida!’ She smiles, exposing sharp teeth, but it is not the smile he remembers. The tattoo on her forehead is glowing a deep, bloody red. ‘Come to me, Gatts.’   
‘What’s happened to you?’  
‘Why, nothing…this is my true form,’ she says, drawing her hands down her sides. ‘Did you never wonder why so many kept coming back to the temple whorehouses? So compulsively, as if they were addicted?’  
‘I did hope it wouldn’t come to this,’ she continues, advancing towards him. ‘I tried to warn you, didn’t I? But you didn’t listen and neither did he. It’s nothing personal, Gatts.’ She smiles at him, suddenly lunging to bite his throat. Gatts grabs her arms and throws her bodily away from him.   
He turns again, making his way to the front of the crowd with increased urgency. Endless bodies are pressed together, clothes haphazard and smeared with dirt. Endless words, endless chanting. Where is the altar? Where are the Priests? Figures show black around a dim central light glowing an unnatural red. He pushes forward past familiar faces grown strange, blank faces offering no recognition. Gaston! He shakes him roughly. Nothing. A looping thought, playing again and again in his mind: ‘Please let him not have started yet’. He keeps going, ignoring all his men, or trying to, as trails of saliva creep down their chins. All these friends, who have fought beside him countless times, with whom he has laughed and eaten. Don’t think! Don’t see! Sour smell of sweat from the mindless, familiar bodies all around him, and bile rises in his throat.   
He keeps going forward, pushing through the last row to see Griffith facing a stone slab in front of flames roaring from a pit, his hair unbound around his shoulders and his face smeared with blood from shallow symmetrical cuts on his cheeks. The Behelit pulses around his neck, swinging on its cord like an obscene lump of flesh. One hand holds a stone knife, and the Priests of the God Hand flank him.   
Griffith beckons with one hand and Casca steps forward slowly. Her eyes are wide and unfocused and she seems bewildered. ‘Griffith?’ she says, her voice uncertain. ‘Griffith, what are we doing?’  
Griffith cocks his head in a vaguely reptilian way. He beckons again and Casca moves to stand in front of him. Griffith draws the back of his hand down her cheek, caressingly, and Casca turns her face into his hand, her face soft. Griffith shifts the knife in his hand, as if testing it.  
Gatts’ stomach lurches sickeningly. He runs forward, grabbing Casca away from Griffith and pushing her protectively behind him. ‘No, please, Griffith!’  
Behind Griffith, the Priestess lifts satisfied eyes to look at Gatts. ‘Ah,’ she says in a pleased voice, ‘it’s your second, my love. And we didn’t even have to go and fetch him.’  
She raises her arms behind her, stretching languorously, expanding and distorting, till black wings arc upwards behind her. Around her, the other Priests are undergoing similar transformations, their bodies twisting and tearing to expose their true forms. They tower above the assembly, as large as the temple idols made in their images.   
Slan laughs. ‘I think it’s time to begin, Griffith.’  
Behind the Hawks, the creatures of the God Hand have multiplied in number, standing expressionlessly behind the men, waiting silently.  
Griffith looks around him slowly, dreamily, and sweeps his hand down in a replica of the gesture Gatts has seen before every battle. A sigh goes through the room, as though some great tension has been released and the monsters fall upon the men, breaking the silence, mangling and tearing human flesh as screams sound throughout the cavern.  
Slan contracts and expands her wings, enjoyment evident in her closed-eyed expression. A rapturous shudder goes through the other deities; they seem to be sucking in the pain of the dying Hawks, feeding on it as the succubi fed on the sexual energy of the soldiers.   
Gatts stands frozen as two succubi approach him, each grasping one of his hands to pull him forward to stand before Griffith. Behind him, Casca gives a choked cry. Griffith raises his head to look at him. His eyes are dilated to black circles ringed with blue and he moves as though he is sleepwalking. Void’s gaunt hand comes to rest on Griffith’s shoulder and he looks at the entity behind him, who nods approvingly. The hand holding the knife lifts slowly, until it is poised in the air, aimed directly at Gatts’ chest. Then it stays there as moments go by.  
Gatts stands very still, looking silently into Griffith’s unreadable face. _So_ , he thinks, _it ends once more. No choice, none at all…_  
‘You know what you have to do, Griffith,’ Void rumbles. ‘There is no room for compassion among the Hand.’ Griffith’s hand begins to shake.  
‘No!’ Griffith, trembling, throws the knife away and leans forward to press his hands to Gatts’ chest. The room whirls around them and disappears, to the accompaniment of laughter from unknown throats.  
>

It is the Dream again. But this time the flying man turns around and his mask is gone. The face is Griffith’s. It is not even a surprise; somewhere, at the back of his mind, he has always known. The childhood companion of his dreams and the best friend of his adolescent years: one and the same, joined to him by unbreakable bonds. The carmine mouth curves in a familiar smile, but looking at his eyes – Griffith’s eyes – he sees what he could not see before: a depthless horror, welling out of those blue eyes and down unmasked cheeks in silver trails. This, he understands, is what Griffith has been terrified of these last few desperate months; this is the unspoken fear in his eyes: that he would turn into this creature, unrestrained by any concept of human morality or compassion.  
‘Help me,’ the mouth says and then shifts into a predatory snarl, as Griffith’s beast fights for possession of the man. The tools of the grisly task the flying man always performs on Gatts flicker around him: knives and whips and serrated tools appearing and disappearing in the murky air. Webbed hands attached to wings stretch and grasp futilely at the air, unable to decide between implements, as conflicted as the entity’s mind.  
Visions flash in the air between them: Midlanders dying of famine and plague and misery; corpses lying thick in withered fields; the capital ruled by fear and torture; half its population with rotting bodies from lack of food and the other half with rotting minds from excess in every indulgence; corrupt rule spreading its fingers throughout Midland and into Chuda, spreading disease and sorrow, and sucking happiness from the provinces into the gaping maw of the capital; unnatural creatures preying on men on the land and the sea, sanctioned by rulers who are themselves inhuman; all of it watched and relished by the dark winged figure at the centre of the web. Gatts recoils mentally in horror.  
Instinctively, he knows what he has to do. _A willing sacrifice, not a life taken without consent_. He takes a step of his own volition, not bound by any force – another first for the Dream, but he knows now that this is the Dream, the only one that will ever make a difference. He walks forward until he is directly in front of Griffith and spreads his arms, offering himself. The stone knife appears, cleansed of blood, in the air to Griffith’s side. A webbed hand clasps the side of Gatts’ face as he looks into Griffith’s anguished expression and nods. _I accept. I make the offering._ Clawed fingers hold the stone knife securely as Griffith pushes the knife between his ribs and both of them scream.  
In that endless instant, Gatts has the impression of immense wheels grinding to a stop and moving backwards, of infinite circles reforming into different shapes. Griffith’s wings and claws have disappeared and his face is young and untroubled as it was on that long ago day when they first met. But his eyes are infinitely sad, infinitely remorseful, and Gatts cannot find it within him to push him away.   
He ignores the pain to clasp his monster closer and Griffith puts his own arms around him, leaving the knife imbedded in Gatts. It is much too late to ask for mercy, he thinks, with a sudden memory of Adonis’ young face in the moment after his sword went through him. He closes his eyes momentarily in pain. He has failed his Hawks, him and Griffith both. Will any of their men survive in the nightmare they have left behind them? Griffith and he are both damned and deservedly so.   
Gatts remembers running down a riverbank with Griffith, on a day not long after he had first joined the Hawks. They had both been laughing, racing each other, finally falling to the grass, breathless and panting. Gatts had turned his head to look at Griffith and they had lain there for a long time, content in each other’s company.   
Now, at the end of so much blood and pain, foolishly, irrationally, that feeling of peace returns to Gatts. Around them, the field of red disappears and they float in a void for what seems like hours, but might only be moments. Slowly, pinpoints of lights appear in the blackness and grow larger, coalescing into a single door-shaped slab of brightness. Spinning slowly around each other, as in a dance, Gatts and Griffith drift towards the door. The movement is not of their own volition. Undoubtedly, judgment awaits them beyond the door. Will it be the God Hand? Or some other more powerful group of supernatural forces? Or perhaps, they are already tried and sentenced, and simply moving on to the next phase of their punishment?   
Gatts finds he does not much care. Within him, a long-forgotten feeling is surging: that of an adventure begun, with a friend for whom he would give his life. He laughs, suddenly, and looks into Griffith’s eyes to see the same expression there. Together, they go through the door.


	8. Epilogue

_Yattsu, Yamiyo ga takete yuku_  
(Eight, a dark night starts to melt)

‘It was pretty bad after the fall of the King’s house,’ the traveller says, ‘what with the riots and everything. I guess you must have heard that the guilds got it under control pretty quickly, but for a week or so, there was complete chaos. I still wonder that Chuda didn’t take advantage of the situation to invade, but I gather they were having problems of their own.’  
The man sitting across from him watches as he takes a drink from his mug of beer, wavering between excitement at this inside account of the momentous events in the far-away capital a year ago and fear that this stranger is playing him for a fool with his unbelievable story. ‘What happened to them Hawks?’ he asks.  
‘Most of them died when the Black Temple collapsed,’ the stranger says, ‘even though…even though some of their friends tried to save them. Others were killed by mobs, or they just vanished into the countryside.’  
The traveller seems unaffected by his companion’s surreptitious examination of his thin face and worn clothes. He has been talking for the better part of an hour with a fluency and detail that compels belief, but nothing about him supports his claim that he was a member of the legendary Band of the Hawk, from the dusty blond hair captured at his neck in a thong, to the patched leather boots on his feet.  
‘And the leaders? Griffith, Gatts, Casca? What about them?’  
The ever-present sadness in the traveller’s eyes intensifies. ‘Casca died,’ he says shortly. ‘So did Corkus and Rickert, but no one knows what happened to Pippin. Griffith and Gatts are said to have disappeared mysteriously right before the temple fell.’  
His drinking companion snorts. ‘Huh, left their men hip deep in shit and hightailed it, did they?’  
‘No, they didn’t,’ the stranger says, with a fierceness that cows the other man. ‘But strange things happen when you deal with the God Hand. I think…I think that they sacrificed themselves to stop something much worse from happening.’  
‘What, they just died? Or maybe they’re roasting in some hell somewhere, eh?’  
‘Some people might argue that they deserved just that, with all the deaths they were responsible for,’ the traveller says. His gaze turns inwards and he seems to speak more to himself now. ‘But they loved each other, you see,’ he says, ‘as much as it was possible for them to love.’ The other man is tempted to make a laughing comment about this ‘love’, but something in the stranger’s green eyes keeps him silent.  
‘And where there is love,’ the stranger continues, ‘there is at least some hope of redemption.’  
‘So what happened to them?’  
The traveller smiles. ‘We can’t know that,’ he says, ‘but I like to think that they found some peace at last.’ He digs a coin out of his pocket and puts it on the table, rising to leave.  
‘Hey, wait a bit! _That’s_ how the story ends?’  
‘Yes.’  
Annoyed at this abrupt end to the conversation, his drinking companion grumbles, ‘That’s a pretty goddamn crappy story.’  
The traveller turns away, pulling his hood over his head and picking up his pack.  
‘Yes,’ he says, walking out of the door. ‘I suppose it is.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The priest's reading to Griffith from this source: The Prince, Nicolò Machiavelli (Written c. 1505, published 1515; Translated by W. K. Marriott).
> 
> (Begun September 2003.Completed July 2004)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimers: Berserk belongs to Kentarou Miura and Hakusensha. Warm thanks go to my patient and long-suffering beta readers, Jeanne and Priya, for beating this story into the shape it is now. I would also like to thank Tsubaki and Sahari for their feedback. Any mistakes are, of course, entirely mine.


End file.
